Share this story A radar is a very simple liar detector. It shouts a pulse into the dark, waits, and measures how long the echo takes to come back. Distance is just time multiplied by the speed of light and halved. There is no judgement in it and no scepticism....
Share this story It begins with a reclining chair and an hour of pure oxygen. Before a U-2 Dragon Lady pilot climbs towards 70,000 feet, the physiological support team seals him into a yellow full-pressure suit, screws on the helmet and parks him in a lounger to flush...
Share this story When a fighter pilot slams the throttle into afterburner, it feels like a direct command to the engine. It is not. On a modern jet the throttle is a request, sent as an electrical signal to a box of electronics bolted to the engine, and that box...
Share this story Every PAC-3 interceptor fired by a Patriot battery depends on one component made in Huntsville, Alabama: the radar seeker in its nose. Boeing builds it as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin, and with Patriot stocks drained by wars in Ukraine and the...
Share this story In a glass case at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne sits a model of a flying boat with twelve engines mounted in pairs above its wing. The placard beside it calls the Dornier Do X the “Jumbo der 1930er-Jahre”, the jumbo of the...
Share this story Stealth is an argument about angles. Shape an airframe so that almost everything a radar sends at it leaves in some other direction, coat what is left so that part of the remainder turns into heat, and the energy coming back to the transmitter falls...
Share this story In the first week of October 2025, Munich Airport shut down twice in roughly twenty-four hours. The first closure stranded around 3,000 passengers, the second about 6,500. Police mounted a large operation on both nights and found nobody. A week...
Share this story In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force learned an awkward lesson. Its laser-guided bombs were superb in clear skies, but dust, smoke, fog and cloud could blind them, and most of the bombs American aircraft dropped were still unguided. Air &...
Share this story The Kuwait theatre, early 1991, after dark. Two F-111Fs circle at medium altitude over a sixty-by-thirty-mile box of desert. In the right seat, a weapon systems officer stares at a small black-and-white screen where the sand has gone cool and grey and...
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story Ten years ago tonight, at about seven in the evening on 9 October 2016, the destroyer USS Mason was north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea when two missiles came off the Houthi-held coast of Yemen. Mason fired two SM-2s and an Evolved...
Share this story At 13:20 UTC on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 in Malaysia Airlines colours was cruising at 33,000 feet over the wheat fields of the Donetsk region, a little under three hours out of Amsterdam. The cockpit voice recorder was running. The crew had no...
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