Curtiss Built a Fighter That Flew Tail-First
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its...
Sweden’s Mach 2 Dragon That Flew From Roads
Share this story In the early 1950s, a neutral country of seven million people set out to build a supersonic interceptor that could hide in the forest, launch from a public road, and climb fast enough to catch a Soviet nuclear bomber over the Baltic. The result looked...
America’s Air War to Keep Hormuz Open
Share this story A commercial oil tanker was steaming through international waters toward Iran when a U.S. aircraft put Hellfire missiles into its smokestack. The ship stopped. It was, in the plainest terms, a blockade being enforced with air power — and it is...
Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
Share this story The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
Share this story For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force...
Gliders, a Dictator, and an Impossible Takeoff
Share this story On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave Desert this month, an aircraft with no pilot, no ejection seat and no name stenciled under a canopy did something no American drone had ever done. It fired an air-to-air missile at a target. The jet was Anduril’s YFQ-44A...
The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?
Share this story For twenty years the MQ-9 Reaper ruled the skies over places where nobody could shoot back. It loitered for a day at a time, watched everything, and struck without warning. It was the defining weapon of an entire era of American war. And then it met...
Checkmate: Russia’s Budget Stealth Bet Against the World
Share this story When Russia rolled a sleek single-engine stealth fighter onto the tarmac at the 2021 MAKS air show — complete with an aggressive marketing blitz and a signature perfume — the Su-75 Checkmate looked like Moscow’s answer to the F-35. Five years later,...
China Drills a Deck Crew for Its Newest Carrier
Share this story A carrier is only as capable as the people who work its deck. On 14 July 2026, the People’s Liberation Army Navy released imagery that made this point plainly: J-15-family fighters running full-cycle takeoff and landing training on land, methodically...
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