Guard Generals to Congress: 100 Fighters a Year
Share this story Two-star generals do not usually gang up on Congress. This spring, twenty-two of them did. In a single letter to the House and Senate appropriators, every adjutant general who commands an Air National Guard fighter unit signed the same blunt verdict:...
Ukraine Loses a MiG-29 in the Dark — Pilot Walks Away
Share this story Somewhere over Poltava Oblast, in the dark hours before dawn on 27 June, a Ukrainian MiG-29 simply went quiet. One moment the fighter was flying a combat mission; the next, contact was gone. The jet did not come home. This is the part of the war that...
Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145
Share this story Walk the static line at ILA Berlin and you expect the usual choreography around a helicopter: a pilot strapping in, a crew chief signalling, the slow whine of an Arriel engine spooling up. This June, Airbus parked something stranger under the...
Seoul Scrambles as 10 Warplanes Test Its Watch
Share this story It is a Saturday morning over the East Sea, and on a Korean radar screen the blips appear early — a cluster of them, more than ten military aircraft, Chinese and Russian, moving in sequence toward the edge of the country’s watch. Inside an...
Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar
Share this story The most expensive fighter program in history just handed the U.S. Marine Corps six brand-new stealth jets that cannot see. In place of their radar, each F-35B carries a chunk of dead weight bolted into the nose to keep the jet balanced. The Marines...
Russia’s Trainer Grows Teeth: Yak-130M Flies
Share this story At the Irkutsk Aviation Plant on 25 June 2026, a two-seat jet that has spent two decades teaching student pilots how to fly lifted off on a roughly 50-minute sortie, climbed no higher than 2,000 metres (about 6,600 ft) and held its speed below 600...
Russian Blackjacks Meet Norway’s F-35s Over the Arctic
Share this story For roughly sixteen hours on 23 June 2026, two of the largest combat aircraft ever built carved a long arc through the cold airspace of the European Arctic. Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers — the variable-sweep giants NATO calls...
Carrier Jets Strike Iran Over Hormuz Tanker
Share this story It is 4:30 in the morning, Eastern time, and the M/T Kiku is doing what tankers have done through the Strait of Hormuz for a century — threading the world’s most important oil chokepoint with more than two million barrels of crude in her...
The Supersonic Fighter That Took Off From the Sea
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked an audacious question: what if a jet fighter did not need a runway, or even an aircraft carrier? What if it could simply take off from the open sea? Convair’s answer was one of the strangest warplanes ever flown...
The Buccaneer: Britain’s Wave-Top Strike Legend
Share this story Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful,...
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