Share this story There are two aircraft in the world that can pick up something genuinely enormous and fly it a very long way. One is Ukrainian and first flew in 1982. The other is American and stopped being built in 2015. Europe owns almost none of either, and the...
Share this story It is one aeroplane. That is the first thing to say, because the numbers here are small and the meaning is not. On Tuesday the British Ministry of Defence announced that a single Royal Air Force Voyager tanker will deploy to help Saudi Arabia defend...
Share this story The golf course at Spangdahlem Air Base sits directly under the approach to Runway 04. On Tuesday afternoon it became a crash site. At roughly half past two local time, a F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the base resident 52nd Fighter Wing came down...
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
Share this story A crate of broken fighter parts is the least glamorous object in military aviation. Nobody guards it the way they guard a jet. It goes in a container, on a commercial aircraft, and turns up at a repair shop on the other side of the world. That is how...
Share this story The Directorate of History and Heritage keeps Canada’s official squadron lineages, and its entry for 664 Squadron opens with five words that contain an entire institutional quarrel: “This Canadian Army squadron was authorized”. 664...
Share this story On 1 February 1968 the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army and the Royal Canadian Air Force stopped existing. Not reorganised, not renamed — abolished, as legal entities, and replaced by a single service called the Canadian Armed Forces....
Share this story The Royal Canadian Navy bought the Grumman Tracker for one reason above all others: it was short enough to fit on HMCS Bonaventure. Then de Havilland Canada built ninety-nine of them at Downsview, the only Canadian-built aircraft the RCN ever ordered....
Share this story HMS Nabob was a Royal Navy escort carrier with a Royal Canadian Navy crew, and on 22 August 1944 a German torpedo opened her starboard side below the waterline, dropped her stern fifteen feet, killed twenty-one of her men and left her dead in the...
Share this story At a quarter to midnight on Monday, Vilnius International Airport stopped accepting arrivals. The cause was not weather, not a technical fault, and not a drone. It was balloons. Lithuanian authorities detected what the airport described as...
Share this story Photographs circulating from Iran this week show a scatter of scorched composite panels, burnt wiring and a small turbojet, laid out on bare ground. Iranian sources say it was shot down. What it is, is more interesting than how it got there. The parts...
Share this story For most of sixty years, the most famous helipad in the world was a metal disc laid on grass. Marine pilots bringing the president home to the White House aimed for it, set down on the South Lawn turf, and departed again. It worked because the...
Recent Comments