Share this story Two years ago the last of them flew into the Arizona desert. Crews delivering the jets to the boneyard signed their names on the nose-gear doors and walked away. Now the US Air Force is asking who could make some of them fly again. On 7 October 2026 a...
Share this story Somewhere over Lebanon, a few minutes from Damascus, seven Israeli Phantoms are flying low under a grey lid of cloud. The weather was fair when they left Israel. Over the Syrian border it has closed in, with turbulence shaking the jets and the ground...
Share this story The first images showed a column of black smoke rising over King Khalid International Airport. The next showed what was underneath it: a Saudia narrowbody standing at the terminal, its cabin burned out, fire crews around it. Nobody is believed to have...
Share this story Eight years ago almost to the day, a Category 5 hurricane walked across Tyndall Air Force Base and tore the roofs off hangars with F-22 Raptors still inside. This week the Air Force is not waiting to find out whether history repeats. Since Thursday, 8...
Share this story Every time a drone shuts an airport, the same explanation appears within hours: the things are simply too small for radar to see. It is a tidy story. It is also wrong, and the measurement literature has been saying so for a decade. A DJI Phantom 3 and...
Share this story On 31 December 2025 a deadline arrived that had been twenty years in the making. From that date, under European law, no aircraft registered in the EU was allowed to carry a halon portable fire extinguisher in its cabin. Large parts of the fleet missed...
Share this story An aircraft does not care how high the runway is. It cares how thick the air is. On a hot afternoon at a mountain airport, the air can be so thin that the aircraft behaves as if it were taking off thousands of feet higher than the altimeter says. It...
Share this story At Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida, a winging ceremony builds to one moment: family members step forward and pin a small gold badge on the chest of a newly graduated naval aviator. Years of flight training come down to that. In April 2026,...
Share this story Listen to a fighter pilot reading back a heading or a squawk code and you will hear something odd: “two-seven-niner”, “tree”, “fife”. It sounds like a quirk of military slang. It is not. Those pronunciations are...
Share this story Watch a training airfield on a busy afternoon and you will see the same thing again and again: an aircraft settles onto the runway, the wheels touch, and instead of slowing down, the engine roars and it lifts straight back into the air. A minute or...
Share this story Every fighter engine that comes out of the repair shop has to prove itself before it goes back into a jet. That means running it at full power, afterburner included, for as long as the technicians need to check it. Do that in the open, next to a base...
Share this story You look up, the jet is already past, and only then does the sky crack: two sharp bangs, a fraction of a second apart. The F/A-18 Hornet above you did not “break” anything at that moment. It had been flying faster than sound for some time....
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