Share this story Here’s something the U.S. Navy doesn’t put in the recruitment brochures: the hardest thing a naval aviator will ever do isn’t dogfighting, or dodging surface-to-air missiles, or threading a low-level attack run through a mountain...
Share this story On a muggy Florida morning in early June, a modified motorized glider rolled onto the runway at Zephyrhills Municipal Airport and changed the trajectory of electric aviation. At the controls was Miguel Iturmendi — test pilot, company founder, and the...
Share this story Every fighter pilot trains for it. Most pray they’ll never experience it. The moment a jet engine — the machine that keeps you flying at 500 knots and 30,000 feet — stops working. Whether it’s a compressor stall that sounds like a cannon...
Share this story The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put...
Share this story The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only...
Share this story NASA’s X-59 Quesst aircraft has reached the speed and altitude it was built to fly. On June 12, 2026, test pilot Jim “Clue” Less pushed the needle-nosed experimental jet to Mach 1.4 at 55,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base — the...
Share this story The U.S. Navy’s next carrier-based fighter just dodged a bullet. After the Pentagon attempted to gut the F/A-XX program in favor of the Air Force’s F-47, Congress has intervened with force — inserting $897.3 million into the FY2026 defense...
Share this story A decade after Boeing shuttered the C-17 Globemaster III production line in Long Beach, California, the unthinkable is back on the table. Boeing says it is “encouraged” by restart discussions with multiple operators, and the House Armed...
Share this story Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if...
Share this story On November 2, 1947, the largest flying boat ever built lifted off the water of Long Beach Harbor, flew for about a mile at seventy feet, and never flew again. In that single minute, Howard Hughes won an argument that had nearly destroyed him. The...
Share this story In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a...
Share this story The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no...
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