At one minute to one on Sunday afternoon, phones across Vilnius lit up telling people to get to shelter. The airport stopped accepting arrivals and departures. A fighter launched from Siauliai, 185 kilometres to the north-west, and went looking for whatever had...
Three numbers changed on Monday morning, and one name. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in National Harbor, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the service now intends to have at least 500 Collaborative Combat Aircraft in...
In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations take a year or...
For decades the American position on weapons in orbit was a careful non-answer. Officials talked about resilience, about protecting assets, about counter-space capability in the abstract. Nobody said the United States had put weapons up there. On Monday morning at...
The United States bought 337 MQ-9 Reapers over the nineteen-year life of the programme. After the fighting with Iran, the Air Force has roughly 135 left, against a floor it says should be 189. That is the arithmetic behind everything that happened on the show floor at...
Every satellite navigation signal that reaches the Earth’s surface arrives weaker than the background noise of the universe. A GPS satellite transmits from 20,000 kilometres up on roughly the power of a car headlight. By the time that signal reaches a receiver...
airBaltic does not fly to the United States. It never has. Its aircraft are Canadian-built, its shareholders are Latvian and German, its passengers are overwhelmingly European, and its longest route tops out somewhere around the Gulf. On Monday it walked into a...
The model on the show floor at National Harbor is 34 feet long and you can walk all the way around it. There is no cockpit, no canopy, no windscreen, nothing for a human head to sit behind. What there is, on top of the fuselage where an intake has no business being,...
A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps, less drag, less...
When the backseater known as Dude 44 Bravo broke his silence on 60 Minutes, most of the coverage went to what he said. The more durable part of the broadcast was what it showed. Alongside the interview, CBS aired video of both rescues that had not been seen publicly...
On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon systems officer,...
Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, NATO fighter aircraft shot down an unidentified drone in Lithuanian airspace. It came down near the village of Pratkūnai, in Kaunas County in the centre of the country. The Lithuanian authorities logged the engagement at 01:19...
Recent Comments