Suppressing an air defence system is one of the most expensive things an air force can do. It normally takes a dedicated aircraft, a specialised crew and a weapon that costs more than a house. Over Konya this month, ASELSAN did the first two-thirds of the job with a...
On 1 January 2028 a rule comes into force that would have killed the Boeing 777 Freighter. Not by banning it from flying, and not by grounding a single existing aircraft. Simply by refusing to issue an airworthiness certificate to a new one. On 16 September the FAA...
Chesley Sullenberger has spent the seventeen years since the Hudson being careful about one thing above all: refusing to let the story be about him alone. He has pushed it back towards the crew, the cabin staff, the ferry captains, the training, the system. He is now...
North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone assembly halls,...
The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at. Then the 31st...
Friday evening, around nine o’clock, somebody flew something over Luxembourg Airport that had no business being there. Within minutes the busiest cargo hub in the Grand Duchy had stopped moving aircraft altogether. The suspension lasted through the night. An inbound...
At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this moment since 2021. It...
Saudi Arabia has been asking for the F-35 for years. On Thursday it finally got an answer, and the answer was yes. The US State Department approved a possible sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighters to the kingdom, an estimated $24.3 billion package that also covers 49...
Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside Ta’if in western...
The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so became the first...
Vincent Burnelli spent nearly fifty years arguing that the fuselage of an aeroplane should not be a tube. It should be a wing. He built aircraft that proved it worked. He never sold one in quantity. One survives, sitting outdoors in Connecticut, and it is the last...
In 1941 the US Army Air Forces asked a sensible question. What if aluminium ran short, and what if the enemy could be fought with something small, cheap and made of wood? Bell answered with the XP-77: a fighter the size of a racing aeroplane, built largely of timber,...
Recent Comments