Share this story The reel asks a good question. A C-17 weighs up to 585,000 pounds. It lands on dirt. So how does it stop without hoovering half the runway into four very expensive turbofans? The honest answer is that it does not avoid it. It eats the dirt, and the...
Share this story Suppressing an air defence system is one of the most expensive things an air force can do. It normally takes a dedicated aircraft, a specialised crew and a weapon that costs more than a house. Over Konya this month, ASELSAN did the first two-thirds of...
Share this story North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone...
Share this story The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at....
Share this story At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this...
Share this story Saudi Arabia has been asking for the F-35 for years. On Thursday it finally got an answer, and the answer was yes. The US State Department approved a possible sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighters to the kingdom, an estimated $24.3 billion package...
Share this story Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside...
Share this story The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so...
Share this story In 1941 the US Army Air Forces asked a sensible question. What if aluminium ran short, and what if the enemy could be fought with something small, cheap and made of wood? Bell answered with the XP-77: a fighter the size of a racing aeroplane, built...
Share this story Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States stopped treating air power as something the Army did on the side. On 18 September 1947 the National Security Act came into force and the United States Air Force became a service in its own right, with...
Share this story In March 1942, while the United States was still flying propeller fighters and would be for the rest of the war, Lockheed handed the Army Air Forces a proposal for a twin-engined jet with a canard foreplane, a blended wing and body, and a predicted...
Share this story On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about,...
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