Share this story One question has shadowed China’s J-36 since it first flew: a tailless aircraft can be stealthy and stable, but can it actually manoeuvre? New footage circulating online appears to answer it. The big, three-engined sixth-generation prototype is...
Share this story When an American F-15E Strike Eagle went down over Iran this spring, the obvious question was what shot it. A new answer is now circulating in Washington — and it points east, to China. According to NBC News, citing sources familiar with the...
Share this story Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune,...
Share this story Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second...
Share this story It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers...
Share this story There is expensive, and then there is “costs more than Air Force One.” The VH-71 Kestrel, the helicopter that was supposed to become the next Marine One, somehow managed the second one. By the time anyone added it all up, the bill for 28...
Share this story Most fighters carry the engine in the nose and the propeller out front. The Swedish Saab 21 did the opposite: it put the engine behind the pilot and the propeller at the very back, spinning between two slender tail booms. It was an elegant answer to...
Share this story Look at it from above and the name explains itself. The Douglas F4D was a broad, tailless delta with gently rounded wingtips — the silhouette of a manta ray gliding through water. The Navy called it the Skyray. The pilots, with magnificent...
Share this story The Republic XF-103 was meant to do something no fighter of the early 1950s could: cruise at Mach 3 — three times the speed of sound — at the edge of the stratosphere, run down a Soviet bomber, and kill it with missiles. To get there, its...
Share this story Count the engines. Most jets have two, or four. The Martin XB-51 had three — two slung under the nose in pods, and a third buried in the tail, breathing through an intake at the base of the fin. It is one of the strangest combat aircraft the...
Share this story Late in the afternoon of 7 June 1981, eight Israeli F-16s are skimming the desert at rooftop height, fuel gauges a constant worry. Flying the last and most exposed aircraft in the formation is the youngest of them, a 27-year-old named Ilan Ramon, who...
Share this story It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky,...
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