A split-second left-hand turn. A missile detonating just meters behind the canopy. A pilot alive only because chance—or instinct—moved his jet out of a kill zone. On March 25, 2026, a US Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet conducted a low-altitude strafing run near Iran’s...
On March 27, 2026, Iranian ballistic missiles and drones screamed across the Arabian Gulf and slammed into Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh. When the dust settled, the damage was devastating: a U.S. Air Force E-3G Sentry early-warning aircraft sat crippled on...
In October 2023, Turkey was expelled from the F-35 programme. The reason: Ankara had purchased the Russian S-400 air defence system, and Washington refused to risk integrating America’s most advanced stealth fighter into an air force that also operated Russian...
The fighter jets rolling onto the runway at NAS Fallon in Nevada are not U.S. Navy aircraft. They are operated by TacAir — a private company based in Reno. The pilots in the cockpits are civilians, many of them former military. Their job is to fly aggressively against...
It came home to Portsmouth on October 11, 2025, callsign TABOR61, nose adorned with two small silhouettes of Shahed-type drones alongside the figure of Ares. The Idaho Air National Guard A-10C had just finished six months in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. It had...
On March 3, 2026, an Iranian ballistic missile got through the air defenses surrounding Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. No one was killed. But the message was impossible to ignore: the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East — home to the air operations...
For thirty years, Prince Sultan Air Base has been the quiet backbone of U.S. air power in the Gulf — a vast installation in the Saudi desert, three hours’ drive from Riyadh, that has hosted American forces through Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and every crisis in...
The U.S. military has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iran in four weeks of war. That number — buried in a Military Times report on March 27 — has set off alarm bells inside the Pentagon. Not because the campaign isn’t working. But because of...
Photographers watching the B-2 Spirits taxi out for another Iran mission on March 25 noticed something odd. Rows of white rectangular patches — uniformly sized, black-bordered — running along the leading edges of both wings. On two separate aircraft. Nobody at the Air...
In U.S. defence procurement, hitting your cost target is newsworthy. Beating it significantly is almost unheard of. Yet that is exactly what Air Force officials are claiming about the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme — the effort to build autonomous drone...
At Edwards Air Force Base in February 2026, an F-22 Raptor pilot did something no fighter pilot has done before in an official U.S. Air Force exercise: he commanded a drone wingman in combat-like conditions. From his cockpit, using a specialist interface on a tablet,...
Poland does not make fighter jets. It hasn’t produced a combat aircraft in decades. But right now, Warsaw is knocking on the door of one of the most exclusive clubs in aerospace — the Global Combat Air Programme — and asking to be let in. What Poland wants is...
Recent Comments