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 —...
Share this story The US Air Force has just raised the spending ceiling on its Boeing KC-46A export contract from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. No aircraft were ordered. No money changed hands. It is, on paper, one of the least dramatic $13.4 billion announcements you...
Share this story A Japanese landing ship arrived in West Kalimantan this week with three CH-47 Chinooks and around 300 people on board. According to the Associated Press, it is the first known overseas firefighting operation the Japan Self-Defense Forces have ever...
Share this story There is a pleasing symmetry in the pictures the Ukrainian presidential office released on Saturday. Twenty-one Ukrainian military pilots are in Canada learning to fly Western fighters. The aircraft they are learning on is a Czechoslovak jet trainer...
Share this story A propeller-driven drone took off from a test centre in Tekirdag on Friday, flew out over the Black Sea, and put a ballistic missile through a ship more than 250 kilometres away. Then it turned round and flew home along its planned route. That is not...
Share this story On the morning of 11 September 2001, four pilots of the District of Columbia Air National Guard ran to their F-16s at Andrews without waiting for live weapons to be loaded. One of them, Lt. Heather Penney, had never scrambled an aircraft before. She...
Share this story Shortly before Christmas 2024, a document arrived at the Swiss Federal Department of Defence (VBS) from Washington. It was a non-paper — the diplomatic instrument governments use to float a position without formally committing to it. Its message...
Share this story Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax...
Share this story On 10 March 1956 a six-engined American bomber descended through a solid deck of cloud over the Mediterranean to meet a tanker. It never arrived. No wreckage was found. No bodies were found. And neither were the two containers of nuclear weapon...
Share this story At 10:31 Greenwich time on 8 April 1950, a United States Navy Privateer lifted off from Wiesbaden and turned for the Baltic. Ten men were aboard. None of them came back, and no trace of any of them has ever been found. The aircraft was called...
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