The ramp at Pituffik is wet, grey and running with meltwater. Behind it a ridge of bare rock streaked with old snow. A marshaller in olive fleece walks backwards with both arms up, and an F-35A Lightning II rolls towards him with WI stencilled on the tail. Wisconsin....
Somewhere over the North Atlantic, in late 1973 or early 1974, a US Air Force F-4C Phantom flew a barrel roll around a Soviet Tu-95 Bear. The Soviet crew had asked for it, by hand signal, through the glass. The photographs were taken by Robert M. Sihler, the weapon...
On 4 November 1977 the United Nations Security Council voted 15 to nothing to impose a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa. It was the first time the Council had ever imposed binding sanctions on a member state. Nine years later South Africa rolled out a supersonic...
On 16 December 1966 the United Nations Security Council imposed the first mandatory arms embargo in its history. The target was Rhodesia, which had declared independence from Britain thirteen months earlier and which no country on earth recognised. The Rhodesian Air...
Air France 4590 lifted off from runway 26 Right at Charles de Gaulle at 16:43 on Tuesday 25 July 2000, already on fire, and hit a hotel at Gonesse about seventy seconds later. Everyone aboard died — 100 passengers and nine crew — along with four people on...
On 10 February 1995, over a stretch of Amazon jungle that neither country could reach easily on foot, four Ecuadorian fighters shot down three Peruvian aircraft in about fifteen minutes. The Cenepa air battle is the only time an IAI Kfir has scored an air-to-air kill...
Britain spent the 1950s building three superb bombers and then discovered it had nothing worth putting in them. The Vulcan, the Victor and the Valiant were designed to fly over the Soviet Union and drop free-fall bombs. By the time they were in squadron service,...
On 5 December 1956 the United States Air Force launched a nuclear-capable cruise missile from Cape Canaveral, sent it towards Puerto Rico, and then lost it. Not lost as in crashed. Lost as in it kept flying, ignored every command including the self-destruct, outran...
The Su-27 and the MiG-29 were designed in the same country, in the same decade, against the same American threat. They were never supposed to meet. They met exactly once, in February 1999, over a stretch of scrub on the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Both fleets...
The helicopters had American flags painted on the fuel tanks, on both cabin doors, on the nose and on the belly. It was a clear spring morning in northern Iraq with good visibility. The lead F-15 pilot passed 1,000 feet to their left and 500 feet above them at 450...
Three people were killed on Tuesday afternoon when a Cirrus SR22T struck a mountainside above Leukerbad, in the Swiss canton of Valais. The Kantonspolizei Wallis said the aircraft had taken off from Lugano and made an intermediate landing at Sion airport before...
In a hangar in Amarillo, Texas, on 16 September 2026, a delegation from Nigeria signed their names on a metal beam. The beam is the spine of the first AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter being built for the Nigerian Air Force. There will be twelve, and the last of them is...
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