Qatar Denies Holding Iran’s Downed Su-24 Crews
Share this story Five months after two Iranian bombers were blown out of the sky short of a US air base in Qatar, a strange and very human question has resurfaced: what happened to the men who were flying them? On 15 August, Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff...
Fujian Moves In as a US Carrier Moves Out
Share this story Aircraft carriers are the ultimate way for a navy to say “we are here.” So when two of them quietly swap ends of the same sea in the same week, it is worth paying attention. That is what happened in mid-August. As the American carrier USS...
China’s J-10C Squares Off With Thai Gripens
Share this story On a sun-baked runway in north-eastern Thailand, two very different ideas of a modern fighter are parked wingtip to wingtip. On one side, China’s J-10C — the same delta-winged jet that Pakistan says it flew against Indian Rafales in 2025....
Ukraine’s Flamingo Strikes a Soyuz Rocket Plant
Share this story In the small hours of 15 August, air-raid sirens climbed over Russia’s Samara region. Minutes later, residents nearly 900 kilometres from the Ukrainian border were filming a wall of orange fire rising above an industrial district — the...
The Biggest Bomber America Ever Built, and Barely Flew
Share this story In June 1941 the United States rolled out a bomber so large that a B-17 could have parked under one of its wings. The Douglas XB-19 spanned 212 feet, carried sleeping bunks and a kitchen for its relief crew, and was, for a time, the largest aircraft...
Shot Down, Then Landed on a Frozen Lake
Share this story On a freezing April night in 1978, a South Korean airliner full of sleeping passengers wandered a thousand miles off course, over one of the most secret corners of the Soviet Union, and was hit by an air-to-air missile. What happened next is one of...
Did a Nazi Bomber Really See New York?
Share this story The story is irresistible: in the depths of the Second World War, a colossal six-engine German bomber slips across the Atlantic, flies to within sight of the Manhattan skyline, photographs Long Island, and turns for home before America ever knows it...
The Beautiful French Fighter Nobody Would Buy
Share this story It was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, and one of the most complete. Bigger, faster and longer-legged than the Mirage 2000 it grew from, the Dassault Mirage 4000 was France’s bid to build a true heavyweight, a...
Mystery Drones Keep Buzzing Australia’s F-35 Base
Share this story For three days in July, something kept flying over the most sensitive fighter base in Australia, and nobody could say what, or whose. Between July 11 and 13, multiple unidentified drones slipped into restricted airspace above RAAF Base Williamtown in...
America Just Lost a Quarter of Its Reapers
Share this story The number landed like a dropped bomb: roughly 45 MQ-9 Reapers gone, about a quarter of the entire fleet, at a cost the Pentagon puts north of $1.3 billion for that one weapon system alone. That is the tally the Washington Post reported on August 13,...
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