Share this story There is an aviation business that never appears at Farnborough. It buys fighter aircraft that no air force wants any more, from countries that need the money, and sells them to countries that are not allowed to buy weapons at all. On Wednesday a...
Share this story At around noon on Wednesday, a fighter in full Royal Canadian Air Force markings lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, with an F-35C flying chase. Bilingual RCAF-ARC lettering on the intakes. A roundel. “Canada” behind the cockpit. A...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September. There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown...
Share this story There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way...
Share this story It is one aeroplane. That is the first thing to say, because the numbers here are small and the meaning is not. On Tuesday the British Ministry of Defence announced that a single Royal Air Force Voyager tanker will deploy to help Saudi Arabia defend...
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
Share this story The Directorate of History and Heritage keeps Canada’s official squadron lineages, and its entry for 664 Squadron opens with five words that contain an entire institutional quarrel: “This Canadian Army squadron was authorized”. 664...
Share this story On 1 February 1968 the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force stopped existing. Not reorganised, not renamed — abolished, as legal entities, and replaced by a single service called the Canadian Armed Forces....
Share this story HMS Nabob was a Royal Navy escort carrier with a Royal Canadian Navy crew, and on 22 August 1944 a German torpedo opened her starboard side below the waterline, dropped her stern fifteen feet, killed twenty-one of her men and left her dead in the...
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
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