USAF Awards $149M for Bunker Buster Warhead Cases
The most expensive part of the biggest conventional bomb in the American inventory is not the explosive. It is the pipe it lives in. On 10 September 2026 the US Air Force awarded a combined $149 million to four companies to keep making those pipes: hardened steel...
Hermeus Ramjet-X: A Ramjet Dropped From a Drone at Mach 3
A ramjet has no moving parts and no way of starting itself. It works by ramming air into a duct so fast that the compression alone is enough to burn fuel usefully, which means that at zero knots on a runway it is an expensively shaped tube of nothing. Something else...
Netherlands Signs for One Saab GlobalEye, Shared With Sweden
The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab announced that...
Novy Urengoy: Ukraine’s Deepest Drone Strike of the War
Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation, and until...
Germany’s First F-35A: 35+01 Flies at Fort Worth
Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code 35+01. Lockheed...
Muwaffaq Salti: Iran Damaged a US A-10 and Eight F-15Es
For seven months of this war, the pattern at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has been the same. Iran fires. Patriots answer. Jordan and CENTCOM announce that the interception rate was high, the base is operational, and everyone is fine. Tehran claims devastation. Nobody...
Minimum Interval Takeoff: B-52s Twelve Seconds Apart
The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings level, still low....
Brian Shul: The Burned Pilot Who Flew the Blackbird
On 20 May 2023, in a hotel ballroom in Reno, a 75-year-old man finished telling a story he had told several hundred times, stepped away from the lectern, and collapsed. There were doctors in the audience. He died at the hospital that night. Brian Shul had spent thirty...
Swiss F-35: Could Viola Amherd Be Personally Liable?
The question being asked in Bern this afternoon is not whether the F-35 procurement went wrong. That is settled. It is whether anyone will personally pay for it. A day after the oversight committee reported that Switzerland never had a fixed price for its F-35As, the...
Convair XF-92A: The Delta Nobody Wanted to Fly
Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different engines, was...
Recent Comments