Share this story Lieutenant Colonel Iceal Hambleton was 53 years old, a navigator with a lifetime in the Air Force behind him and a love of golf. On Easter Sunday, 2 April 1972, he was also the only man to get out of an aircraft blown apart by a Soviet-made missile...
Share this story For six days in June 1995, a hunted man in Bosnia was a 29-year-old American fighter pilot lying face-down in the undergrowth. Bosnian Serb soldiers walked past him. Some fired their rifles nearby. He ate leaves, grass and insects, and squeezed...
Share this story In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force learned an awkward lesson. Its laser-guided bombs were superb in clear skies, but dust, smoke, fog and cloud could blind them, and most of the bombs American aircraft dropped were still unguided. Air &...
Share this story The Navy has looked at a fighter-sized drone that takes off standing on its tail, and decided to put more money on the table. On 8 October 2026, Shield AI announced that the U.S. Navy had executed a $150 million modification to its agreement for...
Share this story Most warships come home with a fresh coat of paint. USS Abraham Lincoln came home with a scoreboard. When the Nimitz-class carrier eased into Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego on Thursday, 8 October 2026, its island was plastered with rows...
Share this story Somewhere in Dublin, a company that does not fly a single passenger has just bought 250 jetliners. On Friday, 9 October 2026, aircraft lessor Avolon announced firm orders for 140 Boeing 737 MAX and 110 Airbus aircraft, plus options on 100 more. If the...
Share this story At 12:56 on Friday afternoon, the ground under southern Panama lurched hard enough to empty one of Latin America’s biggest connecting hubs. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake, centred on the Azuero Peninsula, shook Panama City about 200 kilometres away,...
Share this story Italy’s share of the next-generation fighter now has an address. On Friday, 9 October 2026, Edgewing, the joint company designing the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) fighter for Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom, cut the ribbon on Edgewing...
Share this story The Kuwait theatre, early 1991, after dark. Two F-111Fs circle at medium altitude over a sixty-by-thirty-mile box of desert. In the right seat, a weapon systems officer stares at a small black-and-white screen where the sand has gone cool and grey and...
Share this story On the morning of 5 January 1943, four Japanese dive bombers jumped an American task force off Guadalcanal. One of them hit the New Zealand cruiser Achilles, and the group broke away. As they pulled off, the gunners of the light cruiser USS Helena...
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story Ten years ago tonight, at about seven in the evening on 9 October 2016, the destroyer USS Mason was north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea when two missiles came off the Houthi-held coast of Yemen. Mason fired two SM-2s and an Evolved...
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