On 18 August 2026 a single A-10C Thunderbolt II took off from Nellis Air Force Base, flew a training mission over the Nevada Test and Training Range, and landed. Nothing about the sortie was unusual except everything about it. The aircraft was 82-0665, the last A-10...
Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off the Aleutians,...
The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell that in any other...
On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and that afternoon...
A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the runway upwards....
Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long before the radar...
In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged into that narrow...
A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and put out chaff....
The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate in your face. So a...
The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine aeroplanes. It remains...
Delta has not flown to Monterey since 2008. From 19 December it will fly there twice a day from Los Angeles and once a day from Salt Lake City. The airline announced three new domestic routes on Friday, two of them serving a small coastal California airport it walked...
Most reconnaissance satellites sit in one orbit and photograph the ground. The two the Pentagon just ordered are designed to move, and to photograph each other’s neighbours. On 18 September the Defense Innovation Unit announced that Northrop Grumman and True...
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