The First F-35 in Wild Weasel War Paint
Share this story On 16 June a brand-new F-35A lifted off from Fort Worth, flew for about an hour, and came home behind a chase jet. Routine — except for two black letters painted on its tail: WW.Those letters make aircraft 24-5970 the first F-35 ever to wear the Wild...
Turkey’s Radar-Killer Jet Steps Into View
Share this story It looks, at a glance, like a rich man’s toy: a sleek Bombardier business jet, the kind that ferries executives between capitals. Then you notice the lumps. A long blade running down its spine, blisters under the belly, a fairing crowning the tail —...
A $300,000 Hypersonic Missile for the Super Hornet
Share this story A hypersonic missile usually costs about as much as a small mansion — tens of millions of dollars per shot, hand-built, hoarded like crown jewels. The U.S. Navy just placed an order for a hypersonic missile it hopes to buy for the price of a modest...
Marines Land F-35Bs on a Finnish Highway
Share this story It costs north of a hundred million dollars, it is the most sophisticated fighter the United States builds, and on the morning of 9 June it was sitting on a two-lane road in the Finnish woods, taking on fuel with pine trees a wingspan away.Two U.S....
Stalin’s Rocket Plane and the Devil’s Broomstick
Share this story On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid...
Four Firsts, Then Forgotten: The B-45 Tornado
Share this story On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston...
One Panther, Seven MiGs, Fifty Years of Silence
Share this story The blizzard came in off the Sea of Japan in sheets, and the flight deck of the USS Oriskany pitched in the grey November swell. It was 18 November 1952, and Lieutenant Royce Williams climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F9F-5 Panther for his...
Why Russia Can’t Stop Ukraine’s Drones
Share this story Just after midnight on 18 June 2026, residents of Moscow filmed something the Russian capital was not built to see: black smoke boiling over the Kapotnya district, where the Moscow Oil Refinery sits. It was the second strike on that single plant in a...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
Share this story The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact...
Boeing Won’t Build the Navy’s Next Trainer
Share this story Here is something you do not see every day: Boeing builds a brand-new jet trainer, wins the U.S. Air Force contract, and then tells the U.S. Navy, no thanks. On June 12, the company confirmed it will not bid the T-7A Red Hawk for the Navy’s...
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