Share this story It took a string of defence ministers on both sides of the Pacific and a little more than two years, but the AIM-120 AMRAAM is finally getting a Japanese address. On Wednesday 28 October in Cebu, in the Philippines, Japan’s Defense Minister...
Share this story The photographs look like any official handover: dark suits, a red rope barrier, a framed certificate held up for the cameras. Behind the smiling delegation, though, stands a grey-and-white fighter with the Ethiopian tricolour on its twin tails. On...
Share this story A cheap drone is a hard thing to stop. It is small, slow and low, which makes it difficult to see on radar, and it is so inexpensive that firing a conventional air defence missile at it is a losing trade. Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has turned that...
Share this story A landplane accelerates down a smooth runway. A floatplane has to fight its way out of the water first, and water does not want to let go. The roar, the spray, the moment the nose drops and the aircraft suddenly skims like a speedboat: that is a...
Share this story Airline seat maps quote a number most passengers never think about until their knees meet the seat in front: seat pitch. It is the closest thing the industry has to a measure of how much room you get, and it is also widely misunderstood. Pitch is not...
Share this story Everyone who flies knows the scene. Your group is called, you shuffle down the jet bridge, and then you stop. Somewhere ahead, someone is wrestling a roll-aboard into an overhead bin, and forty people wait behind them in a single-file aisle. Boarding...
Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer’s pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone...
Share this story In 1960 and 1961, thirteen American women pilots went through the same punishing medical tests used to pick the Mercury Seven astronauts. They swallowed rubber tubes, had ice water poured into their ears and pedalled weighted bicycles to exhaustion....
Share this story In August 1929, most people had never been in an aeroplane, and nobody had flown around the world in anything as comfortable as a hotel. Then a silver airship 236 metres long drifted over Tokyo, then over the Pacific, then over Los Angeles, with a...
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran’s air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters...
Share this story In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived...
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