Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave in the first week of November, a bomber that officially does not have a published wingspan opened its bay and let something fall out of it. Nobody filmed it. Nobody has said what it was. The U.S. Air Force waited a week, then...
Share this story Italy is paying a lot more for fewer F-35s. On 30 October 2026 the government sent parliament a draft decree, programme SMD 5/2026, that continues the country’s 2009 F-35 programme with a new multi-year funding tranche. If approved, the total...
Share this story A year after Türkiye signed for 20 new Eurofighter Typhoons, the first of them is taking physical shape. BAE Systems announced on 5 November 2026 that assembly of the aircraft’s front fuselage is under way at its Samlesbury factory in...
Share this story For the 1957 show season, the Blue Angels rolled out something new: a small, sleek Grumman jet with a pinched waist and a needle nose that could go supersonic. The jet was the Grumman F11F Tiger. As a fleet fighter it was a disappointment, gone from...
Share this story On 31 October 1974, two identical jets took off for the first time on the same day, in two different countries. One left Batajnica, near Belgrade. The other left Bacău, in Romania. The timing was deliberate: for political reasons, the two first...
Share this story In February 1962, Mao Zedong received an unexpected letter from Nikita Khrushchev. Two years after the Sino-Soviet split had led Moscow to withdraw its advisers from China, the Soviet leader was offering Beijing the technology for the most modern...
Share this story On 7 September 1987, two Libyan bombers ran in towards N’Djamena, the capital of Chad. A French MIM-23 Hawk missile battery fired, and one of them fell out of the sky. Inside the cockpit section were the bodies of its crew of three, all East...
Share this story On Sunday 15 June 2025, thousands of people packed the beaches of the Mar Menor in Murcia to watch seven red-and-yellow jets trail the colours of the Spanish flag one last time. King Felipe VI was among them. The Patrulla Águila was flying its...
Share this story In 1964, China’s aircraft designers faced a problem they could not buy their way out of. The country’s best fighter, the J-7, a home-built copy of the MiG-21, lacked the range and altitude performance to catch high-flying bombers and...
Share this story The pilot is sitting in an air-conditioned box in the Nevada desert. The aircraft is thousands of miles away, circling over a different continent at 20,000 feet. When the pilot moves the stick, the MQ-9 Reaper answers, but only after the command has...
Share this story On the morning of 6 November 1981, two South African Air Force jets were scrambled from Ondangwa to intercept a pair of Angolan MiG-21s. The missiles would not guide. So Major Johan Rankin closed in and shot one of the MiGs down with his 30 mm cannon....
Share this story Somewhere over West Pakistan in December 1971, a missile fired by a Pakistani fighter slammed into the tail of an Indian Sukhoi Su-7. The blast carried away half the rudder and wrecked the elevators, ailerons and flaps. Wing Commander H.S. Mangat,...
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