JP-8, JP-5 and Jet A: The Fuels Fighter Jets Burn
Share this story Walk up to a fighter jet after a sortie and the smell hits you before anything else: warm kerosene. To most people, jet fuel is just jet fuel. To air forces and navies, it is a family of carefully specified liquids with names like JP-8, JP-5 and F-24,...
TACAN Explained: How Military Jets Find Their Way Home
Share this story A fighter pilot coming home in bad weather wants to know two things: which direction is base, and how far away is it. For more than seventy years, the answer in military cockpits has come from a system with a slightly clumsy name: TACAN, short for...
Pan Am Flight 6: The 1956 Pacific Ditching Where All 31 Survived
Share this story In the middle of the night, halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco, the Boeing Stratocruiser Clipper Sovereign of the Skies lost two of its four engines. It was too far from land to make it either way. So for hours, its crew flew circles in the...
Mach 2 in Zurich: How ETH’s Wind Tunnels Made Switzerland an Aerodynamics Pioneer
Share this story On New Year’s Eve 1934, engineers in the machine laboratory of ETH Zurich switched on a new wind tunnel for the first time. Next door stood something even more unusual: a tunnel built to blow air past models at twice the speed of sound, in a...
Carrier Barricade Explained: The Nylon Net That Catches Jets
Share this story Every carrier landing is designed around a hook and a wire. The pilot flies the jet onto the deck, the tailhook snags one of the arresting cables, and the aircraft stops in a couple of seconds. But what happens when the hook will not come down, or the...
ValuJet 592 to Power Banks: What You Cannot Take on a Plane
Share this story The shipping ticket said “Oxy Cannisters — ‘Empty’.” The spelling was wrong and so was the word in quotation marks. There were five cardboard boxes, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds, and they were loaded into the forward...
P1-SUN JetKiller: Ukrainian Interceptor Drone Downs a Second Geran-5
Share this story The target flies faster than the hunter. That is the problem Ukraine’s newest interceptor drone was built to solve, and according to its maker it has now solved it twice. On 3 October 2026, Ukrainian company SkyFall told Militarnyi that its...
Cóndor: Chile’s Boeing 707 With a Radar for a Nose
Share this story Most airborne early-warning aircraft announce themselves with a giant spinning disc on their back. The Chilean Air Force’s Cóndor did it with its face. Where a Boeing 707 should have a slim, pointed nose, this one had a huge rounded bulge, as if...
Su-27 Tail Stinger: What Is Inside the Flanker’s Tail Boom?
Share this story Every Su-27 Flanker has a tail that does not quite end. Between the two big engine exhausts, the centre of the fuselage keeps going, a long pointed boom sticking out behind the jet like a sting. Spotters call it the “stinger”, and it is...
MiG-21 Nose Cone Explained: How the Shock Cone Feeds a Mach 2 Jet
Share this story Look a MiG-21 in the face and the first thing you see is a hole with a cone in it. The whole nose of the aircraft is one big round air intake, and sitting in the middle of it, like the stopper in a bottle, is a pointed cone. That cone is not...
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