Nothing about the night looked like the start of an emergency. On the ramp at London Heathrow, a One Air Boeing 747 freighter sat with its left forward passenger door — the L1 door — standing open, because the engineers changing its smoke detectors were...
An air-to-air missile is built on an assumption: that something else will carry it to the fight. It expects to be released at nine or ten kilometres, already doing Mach 0.9, from a wing rail that has spent twenty minutes climbing. It expects a fighter radar to tell it...
Somewhere over the Luhansk region, a Russian Su-34 Fullback pulls into a shallow climb at around 12,000 metres, holds it for a few seconds, and lets go of four objects that look like ordinary bombs wearing borrowed wings. The aircraft never crosses the front line. It...
On 9 September the National Transportation Safety Board published the first hard numbers from the Miami accident. They are not a verdict. They are a list of times, speeds and annunciations read off two recorders in a laboratory in Washington, and the agency attached...
Two accounts of the same night at the same air base went public within a day of each other this week. They do not agree. The first came from US officials speaking on condition of anonymity to CBS News, to Reuters and to Air & Space Forces Magazine. In their...
The white jet with the blue-and-yellow tail sat on the apron at Chișinău on Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to go. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Oslo that evening for the funeral of King Harald V, a state occasion with more than 150 inbound flights and a...
For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem. On 27 August 2026, an F-15EX Eagle II...
The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama: aerodrome availability is...
Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to force that...
Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged Piper Cub that...
Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person strapped into it...
The story usually goes like this. Germany built a wooden night fighter to match the de Havilland Mosquito. It was fast and it worked. Then the RAF bombed the single factory making the special glue that held it together, the substitute adhesive was corrosive, the...
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