Share this story Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur, 23 September 1913, 5:47 in the morning. The sea is still grey, the air smells of salt and the burnt castor oil that every rotary engine of the era coughs over its pilot. A small, dark-eyed man settles into a...
Share this story Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees...
Share this story Gate 15 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, a few minutes past midnight on the last day of August 1983. A Boeing 747 sits in the floodlights, doors open, while 246 passengers file aboard: businessmen bound for Taipei and Hong Kong, honeymooners,...
Share this story At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power,...
Share this story The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky,...
Share this story At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard,...
Share this story At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks...
Share this story Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air...
Share this story Last week we walked you through the sustainment data fight simmering between Boeing and the Air Force over the T-7A Red Hawk. Seven days later, the Government Accountability Office showed up with receipts. GAO’s Weapon Systems Annual Assessment,...
Share this story Commercial satellite imagery has revealed two hardened structures of an unfamiliar type at China’s most important missile test and training complex, and their geometry does not match anything previously catalogued there. The structures, at the...
Share this story When we wrote last week that NATO’s next radar jet would be Swedish, the news still wore the modest clothing of a Reuters exclusive. On Tuesday in Ankara, it acquired numbers, signatures and a price tag. Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed...
Share this story The sirens came before the sunrise. In Manama’s old quarters and along Kuwait City’s waterfront towers, the same rising wail that Gulf residents have learned by heart this year pulled families out of bed and into stairwells in the small...
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