A Robot Built the Part That Saved This C-17
Share this story A hailstorm, two runaway business jets, and a nose panel that nobody would build. That is the short version of how a U.S. Air Force C-17 ended up grounded for the better part of a year and a half. The long version ends with a robot, a research lab in...
Iran Puts a Downed Strike Eagle on Display
Share this story Iran has turned a hole in the ground into a trophy case. This week the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threw open an underground “exhibition” of American and Israeli aircraft it says its air defences knocked out of the sky. The...
The Spitfires That Flew a Red Star Into Battle
Share this story Look closely at the tail of the Spitfire and something is wrong — gloriously, deliberately wrong. Beside the familiar red-white-blue fin flash of the Royal Air Force sits a five-pointed communist red star. This is a British fighter, in British...
The US Plan to Firebomb Japan With Bats
Share this story In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should...
The Bomb Steered by Live Pigeons
Share this story In the middle of the Second World War, one of the most famous psychologists in America proposed a guidance system for bombs that used no radar, no gyroscopes, and no vacuum tubes. It used pigeons. Live ones. Riding inside the nose of the bomb.The...
The Giant That Flew Before the Fighters
Share this story In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It...
The Jet With Giant Fans Hidden in Its Wings
Share this story Most vertical-takeoff jets of the 1960s did the obvious thing: point the engine nozzles down and blast the aircraft off the ground. Ryan’s XV-5 Vertifan did something far stranger. It hid two enormous fans inside its wings, spun them with its...
The Last Aircraft Curtiss-Wright Ever Built
Share this story The name Curtiss-Wright carried a century of aviation in it — the fusion of Glenn Curtiss’s company with the firm founded by the Wright brothers themselves. For decades it built engines, propellers and aircraft that helped win two world...
Poland’s MiG-29s Are Going to Ukraine After All
Share this story For months the story ran the wrong way. Poland was going to scrap its last MiG-29 fighters rather than hand them to Ukraine, a drones-for-jets deal apparently dead in the water. On 7 August 2026 the narrative flipped.Ukraine’s Ambassador to...
France Puts 114 Rafales on India’s Table
Share this story France has made its move. On 6 August 2026, Dassault Aviation handed New Delhi a formal techno-commercial proposal for 114 Rafale fighters — the long-awaited answer to India’s Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) tender, and one of the...
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