Share this story There was no flypast for this one. No water cannon, no speeches, no crowd on the ramp at Cherry Point. Marines took the wings off it, pulled the classified boxes out, put it on a flatbed and drove it to Florida. The aircraft is BuNo 166288, modex...
Share this story For most of a decade, France told itself a story about the 2040s in which the Rafale was a bridge to something else. That something else was FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System, and in June it broke apart. Which leaves Dassault...
Share this story For five months the United States Air Force has said almost nothing about the man it went back for. He has no name in the public record. He has a call sign, and that is deliberate: Dude 44 Bravo, the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle...
Share this story Just after nine on Saturday morning, a nine-seat business jet greased onto a runway built for heavy bombers. The pilot had been aiming for a quiet private airfield in the Cotswolds. He got the United States Air Force instead. The aircraft was D-CJMK,...
Share this story In March 2026, Israel said it had destroyed Iran’s F-14 Tomcat fleet at Isfahan. Three months later Iranian state television showed a Tomcat coming home from a mission. Six months later, social media is still confidently announcing that the last...
Share this story A Lockheed F-104 Starfighter came down final approach at 175 knots with full flaps, and that was the basic number. The pilot then added five knots for every 1,000 pounds of fuel still in the tanks above the first thousand. On a typical recovery that...
Share this story In August 2026 the US Air Force posted a contracting notice so dull that almost nobody read it. It concerned cartridge- and propellant-actuated devices for the F-117 Nighthawk — an aircraft officially retired in 2008. The internet noticed the...
Share this story The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire. Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a...
Share this story In 1971 a Swiss fighter jet landed on a motorway. Not in an emergency — on purpose, as part of a doctrine that assumed Swiss airfields would be cratered within hours of a war starting, and that the air force would therefore have to operate from...
Share this story Britain came out of the Second World War with a captured German idea it did not fully understand. The delta wing promised high speed and a strong, light structure, and the Germans had been drawing them for years. Nobody in Britain knew what one...
Share this story At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a...
Share this story In April 1980 a very ill old man was wheeled into a room at Northrop and shown a model of an aircraft. He had spent his career insisting that the ideal aeroplane was a wing and nothing else — no fuselage, no tail, no drag it did not need —...
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