Poland and the F-15EX: Warsaw Denies a $131 Billion Hint
Share this story Buried in a routine American contract announcement on Monday was a single word that set the European defence press moving: Poland.The US Department of War confirmed that Boeing had been awarded an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for...
J-20 Mystery Shapes Solved: China’s Fire-Training Mock-Ups
Share this story For four years, one of the more entertaining puzzles in open-source intelligence has been a set of aircraft-shaped objects sitting on Chinese ramps. They looked a bit like the Chengdu J-20. They also looked a bit wrong. Analysts squinted at satellite...
Blackbeard on the Super Hornet: Hypersonic Testing Begins
Share this story Somebody at the Tailhook Association convention this past weekend was holding a camera when the U.S. Navy put a particular slide on the screen. On it: a pair of Castelion Blackbeard test articles hanging under the right wing of an F/A-18E/F Super...
The Nimitz Tic Tac: What the Navy Aircrew Actually Reported
Share this story On 14 November 2004, a US Navy F/A-18F on a routine training intercept off southern California was vectored onto something the cruiser USS Princeton had been tracking for days. The squadron commander who flew that intercept has described what he saw...
Cross-Decking F-35Bs: When a British Carrier Armed an American Jet
Share this story Five years ago this month, a US Marine Corps F-35B took off from a British aircraft carrier, landed on an American assault ship, took on fuel and weapons, and flew off again to attack a second set of targets. The Marine Corps called it the first time...
Black Hawk Down: The Air Battle Over Mogadishu, 1993
Share this story The raid was supposed to take thirty minutes. Sixteen helicopters, a four-minute flight, two Somali commanders lifted out of a building near the Olympic Hotel, and home. What happened instead ran for seventeen hours and cost eighteen American lives,...
Gloster E.28/39: Britain’s First Jet, and a Lapsed Patent
Share this story At about twenty to eight on the evening of 15 May 1941, after a day of weather bad enough to keep everyone waiting, a small silver aeroplane with no propeller took off from RAF Cranwell and flew for seventeen minutes. It was not the first jet aircraft...
TBF Avenger at Midway: Six Went Out, One Came Back
Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114: The Airliner Shot Down Over Sinai
Share this story At two minutes past noon on 21 February 1973, the co-pilot of a Libyan Boeing 727 told air traffic control in Cairo that he was ten miles out and ready to descend. He was a hundred and five miles away, in the wrong country, with two Israeli Phantoms...
John Ratcliffe in Moscow: Why the CIA Director Flew In on a C-17
Share this story Yesterday we covered the flight itself: an unmarked US Air Force C-17 that appeared over Moscow, sat at Vnukovo for about eight hours, and went home. You can read that here — The Moscow Mystery Jet Carried the CIA Director. The obvious question...
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