Share this story At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the...
Share this story Captain Daniel Arsenault was running a morning charter out of Pensacola on Saturday when he spotted something floating offshore. He went over for a look, the way you do. Underneath it was a good-size mahi-mahi, which went straight into a cooler...
Share this story Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday...
Share this story On 18 August 2026 a single A-10C Thunderbolt II took off from Nellis Air Force Base, flew a training mission over the Nevada Test and Training Range, and landed. Nothing about the sortie was unusual except everything about it. The aircraft was...
Share this story On 6 November 1943, over the Soviet counter-offensive that became the Battle of Kiev, a German fighter pilot logged thirteen aerial victories between 13:00 and 13:17. Eight Yak-7s and five Yak-9s. Seventeen minutes. The pilot was Erich Rudorffer, and...
Share this story A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the...
Share this story Every radar that is looking for you has to shout to do it. That is the whole weakness of the thing. A fire-control radar cannot find a target without flooding the sky with energy, and any aircraft carrying the right antennas can hear that energy long...
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
Share this story A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and...
Share this story The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate...
Share this story The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine...
Share this story Most reconnaissance satellites sit in one orbit and photograph the ground. The two the Pentagon just ordered are designed to move, and to photograph each other’s neighbours. On 18 September the Defense Innovation Unit announced that Northrop...
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