Serbia Buys Chinese HQ-9: Beijing’s Missiles in NATO’s Backyard
Share this story Two hundred miles from the nearest NATO border, Serbia is building an air defence network that Beijing designed and no Western alliance approved. On 28 June, President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed what defence analysts had suspected for months: Belgrade...
Ghost Bat Goes to War: MQ-28 Debuts at Valiant Shield
Share this story The future of air combat just landed on a tiny Pacific island. Boeing’s MQ-28A Ghost Bat — the autonomous combat drone that could change everything about how wars are fought in the air — touched down at a remote airfield on Rota in the Northern...
Tomcats 4, Gaddafi 0: The Gulf of Sidra Shootdowns
Share this story Muammar Gaddafi drew a line across the Mediterranean and dared the United States Navy to cross it. The Navy crossed it twice. Both times, F-14 Tomcats answered. The two Gulf of Sidra incidents — 1981 and 1989 — are the only American air-to-air kills...
How Fly-by-Wire Replaced Cables and Changed Everything
Share this story Before the F-16, every fighter jet on earth had a direct mechanical link between the pilot’s stick and the control surfaces. Steel cables, push rods, bellcranks — a system fundamentally unchanged since the Sopwith Camel. In 1974, General...
The German Jump Jet That Lost to Math
Share this story It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is...
The Day Japanese Naval Aviation Died
Share this story It is just after ten in the morning on 19 June 1944, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Alexander Vraciu is hanging in the blue over the Philippine Sea, hood back, oxygen mask tight, hunting. Below and ahead of his Grumman F6F Hellcat, a loose gaggle of...
The Jet With Its Wings on Backwards
Share this story Roll the X-29 onto its back and the wings look wrong. Not damaged, not folded for storage — just backwards. Where every other jet on the ramp sweeps its wings rearward like an arrowhead, the X-29 sweeps them forward, the tips reaching out ahead...
The Aircraft That Had No Wings
Share this story It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth...
The Drones Come Home: Russia’s Refineries Burn
Share this story The fire that broke out before dawn on Sunday in a refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region was, by now, a familiar sight. Columns of black smoke climbed kilometres into low cloud over Slavyansk-na-Kubani, a stone’s throw from annexed Crimea....
The World’s Only Civilian Phantom Flies Again
Share this story It is mid-morning on 8 June 2026 at Ellington Field in Houston, and Harry “D-Day” Daye is strapping into a machine that has not left the ground in seven years. The ramp smells of jet fuel and Texas heat. Behind him sits Jerod Flohr, one of the...
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