MiG-23 Flogger: The Swing-Wing MiG American Pilots Feared
Share this story More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first...
The Football War 1969: The Last Dogfight Between Propeller Fighters
Share this story On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air...
A-7 Corsair II: The SLUF Attack Jet That Never Missed
Share this story The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the...
413th Flight Test Squadron: Test Pilots Turned Rescue Crews
Share this story The 413th Flight Test Squadron does not fly rescue missions. It is a test unit. It puts helicopters through developmental trials and writes up the results. But when the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center calls, it is usually because everything else...
CCA Increment 2: America’s Next Robot Fighter Needs a New Engine
Share this story The first generation of America’s robot fighters is already being built. The second generation is still an argument about engines. Speaking at the Air Force’s Life Cycle Industry Days conference in Dayton, Ohio, senior acquisition...
China’s J-36 Designers Warn Against AI Hallucinations in Combat
Share this story Ask a large language model for the combat radius of a foreign fighter and it will give you a number. Confident, specific, formatted like a fact. It may also be entirely invented. That is an inconvenience if you are writing a school essay. It is...
Poland Opens Europe’s Biggest Apache Service Centre
Share this story Poland has ordered 96 AH-64E Apache Guardians. When they arrive it will be the second-largest Apache fleet on earth, behind only the United States Army. Ninety-six attack helicopters is a headline. What happened at a factory in Łódź...
GBU-39 on the BRU-61: The Rack That Quadruples an F-16’s Targets
Share this story A fighter has a fixed number of places to hang things. Wings, fuselage, wingtips. Every pylon you fill with a bomb is a pylon you cannot fill with fuel, a targeting pod, or a missile to defend yourself with. That arithmetic has constrained air...
Next Generation Interceptor Passes Stage-2 Motor Vacuum Test
Share this story America’s defence against an intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at its homeland currently rests on 44 interceptors: 40 buried in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg in California. The design dates to the early 2000s. The...
Su-57D: Russia’s Two-Seat Felon Will Test Combat AI
Share this story On 14 August 2026 the Russian state news agency TASS reported that the two-seat Su-57D will be used to test combat artificial intelligence under development at the Sukhoi Design Bureau. The source was Mikhail Strelets, the bureau’s director,...
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