Share this story At 10:27 on the morning of 24 October 1944, eight dive bombers from the carrier USS Intrepid tipped over above the Sibuyan Sea and went for the biggest target any of their crews had ever seen. Below them steamed Musashi, one of the two heaviest...
Share this story The most violent test an airliner engine ever faces happens on the ground. With the engine running at its maximum permitted speed, a small explosive charge at the root of one fan blade cuts it loose. The blade must be stopped by the engine casing, and...
Share this story A heat-seeking missile chases something it can feel: the hot exhaust of an engine. A radar-guided missile chases something it cannot see at all until a radar wave bounces off it. That difference is why radar missiles can kill from beyond visual range,...
Share this story Counting aircraft from orbit is a strange way to follow a weapons programme, but with China it is often the only way. On 5 October 2026 a commercial satellite passed over Xi’an-Yanliang airfield in Shaanxi province and photographed four KJ-3000...
Share this story For seven years the Thanh Hoa Bridge simply refused to fall. American aircraft flew more than 870 sorties against the “Dragon’s Jaw” south of Hanoi and lost 11 aircraft doing it. Then, in the spring of 1972, a handful of Phantom...
Share this story A grey Super Hornet over the Mojave, blue-banded test rounds under its wings, and a first for US naval aviation. On 14 October 2026, an aviation photographer caught a US Navy F/A-18F from Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31 over Ridgecrest,...
Share this story A two-seat Flanker down in a field, two pilots on the end of parachutes, and an empty patch of countryside in Russia’s Baltic exclave. On 21 October 2026, a Russian Su-30 crashed during a scheduled training flight in the Kaliningrad region. Both...
Share this story Nine years after its launch at the Paris Air Show and more than six years after its original service-entry target, the Boeing 737 MAX 10 finally has its paperwork. On 20 October 2026 the US Federal Aviation Administration approved the amended type...
Share this story For three decades, the antenna field outside Gakona, Alaska, has been the most misunderstood radio transmitter in the world. Now the US military has given it a job conspiracy theorists never predicted: lighting up aircraft far beyond the horizon so...
Share this story Almost nobody ever saw an SR-71 at work. On operational missions the Blackbird cruised at more than three times the speed of sound and above 80,000 feet, far beyond the view of anyone on the ground. Which is why footage of it making low passes at air...
Share this story At three seconds past 0847 on 8 January 2003, the captain of Air Midwest flight 5481 said two words into the cockpit voice recorder: “help me.” The Beech 1900D had just left runway 18R at Charlotte and the nose would not come down. Ten...
Share this story Late on the afternoon of 27 March 1945, 102 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses lifted off from Tinian. The crews had been firebombing Japanese cities for weeks, but on this night their bomb bays carried no incendiaries. Each bomber held a dozen sea mines....
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