In 1941 the US Army Air Forces asked a sensible question. What if aluminium ran short, and what if the enemy could be fought with something small, cheap and made of wood? Bell answered with the XP-77: a fighter the size of a racing aeroplane, built largely of timber,...
Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States stopped treating air power as something the Army did on the side. On 18 September 1947 the National Security Act came into force and the United States Air Force became a service in its own right, with its own secretary,...
In March 1942, while the United States was still flying propeller fighters and would be for the rest of the war, Lockheed handed the Army Air Forces a proposal for a twin-engined jet with a canard foreplane, a blended wing and body, and a predicted top speed of 612...
On 18 November 1947 a test pilot took off from San Diego in a car with an aeroplane bolted to the roof, and discovered somewhere over the mud flats that he had almost no aviation fuel on board. He had checked the fuel gauge before departure. It was the wrong one. He...
On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about, because for most of...
The object was less than a millimetre long on the print. It sat on a photograph of a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, among thousands of other specks, and a woman in a Buckinghamshire country house looked at it through a magnifying glass and worked out that its wings...
The US Air Force has finally put a month on the T-7A. August 2027, fourteen aircraft, one squadron. After a programme that has slipped so often the dates stopped meaning much, that is a surprisingly specific thing to say out loud. Lt. Gen. Clark Quinn, who runs Air...
An airliner fuselage contains something in the order of a million rivets. Each one is a hole drilled through the skin, which is to say a stress concentration deliberately introduced into a pressure vessel, repeated a million times. A welded fuselage would have none of...
Airlines are not short of passengers. They are short of cheap fuel, and the first thing that breaks is the flight that was only ever marginally worth operating. At the Morgan Stanley Laguna Conference on 16 September, American Airlines chief executive Robert Isom told...
The US Space Force is the smallest armed service the United States has ever fielded. It is now planning to more than double, and the number it has quietly put on that ambition is bigger than the word “double” suggests. At the Air & Space Forces...
A medium-altitude, long-endurance drone landed on a dirt track that tanks drive down, in the middle of a live-fire range, while a simulated battle was going on around it. Then it took off again and carried on with the mission. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and...
Ukraine says it destroyed six Russian aircraft in one night, on the ground, at an airfield 160 kilometres from the front line. If the claim holds, it is among the heaviest single-night losses Russia has taken at one air base since the invasion began. The target was...
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