Share this story A post doing the rounds on Instagram tells a neat story: Morgan Freeman wanted to be a fighter pilot, gave it up for acting, and then, at 84, finally bought himself a jet. The first part is close to the truth. The last part is off by seven years, and...
Share this story Every fighter pilot is taught to respect the stall. Pull too hard, raise the nose too far, and the wing stops producing lift and the aircraft stops doing what you want. On 29 April 1993, over the Mojave Desert, the second Rockwell-MBB X-31...
Share this story On 10 February 1906, King Edward VII smashed a bottle against the bow of a new battleship at Portsmouth. A year after work on her began, HMS Dreadnought went to sea for trials, and every other battleship in the world, including all of Britain’s...
Share this story On paper, the X-57 Maxwell was one of the most exciting aircraft NASA had drawn in decades: a small, all-electric airplane with fourteen propellers strung along a skinny wing, promising to cruise five times more efficiently than the twin it was based...
Share this story Every fighter you have ever seen has a tail. Fins keep it pointing forward, rudders turn it, and for a stealth aircraft those same fins are big flat radar reflectors. In 1997, NASA and McDonnell Douglas flew a small, sinister-looking jet over the...
Share this story The X-43A proved a scramjet could work for ten seconds. The question the US Air Force asked next was harder: could one keep working for minutes, burning the kind of fuel a real aircraft could carry? On 1 May 2013, over the Pacific, the Boeing X-51A...
Share this story It had no wings worth the name, no engine running at touchdown and only one chance to get it right. On 5 August 1975, NASA test pilot John Manke brought the X-24B lifting body down from 60,000 feet without power and landed it on the concrete main...
Share this story On 12 December 1953, Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1A to Mach 2.44, faster than any human had flown. Seconds later the rocket plane went completely out of control. It rolled, yawed and tumbled end over end, slamming Yeager’s helmet into the...
Share this story Off the coast of southern California on 16 November 2004, a NASA B-52B released a rocket with a strange, flat, surfboard-shaped object bolted to its nose. The Pegasus booster lit, climbed to about 110,000 feet and let go. For roughly ten seconds, the...
Share this story If you take your first flying lesson in America a couple of years from now, there is a growing chance it will be in an Italian two-seater with a carbon-fibre fuselage. Tecnam announced on 5 October 2026 that it is bringing its P2008JC NG trainer to...
Share this story Asked when Indonesia’s Chinese fighters will finally show up, the head of the Indonesian Air Force smiled and gave a two-word answer. “Just wait,” Air Marshal Mohamad Tonny Harjono told Republika on 5 October 2026, on the sidelines...
Share this story India has picked a test pilot to lead its air force through one of its most demanding decades. The government announced on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, that Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, currently Vice Chief of the Air Staff, will become the next Chief of...
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