Share this story It looks like a rifle, weighs less than five pounds, and you can teach somebody to work it in under five minutes. Pacific Air Forces wants sixty of them. It does not, at present, have the money to pay for them. On 8 September 2026, PACAF’s 18th...
Share this story The problem with the FPV attack drone — the weapon that has defined three years of fighting in Ukraine — is that it needs a pilot. Not a technician, a pilot: somebody who can fly a fast, twitchy quadcopter into a moving target through a...
Share this story On Monday morning a white and red turboprop lifted off from Buochs, the airfield tucked under the mountains next to Pilatus’s factory in Stans, and flew a first sortie over central Switzerland. It carried the Swiss test registration HB-HCA and...
Share this story Russia brought its new stealth weapons to a sand-coloured airfield on the Egyptian coast this week and, for the first time, let people photograph them. At the El Alamein International Airshow, sitting on the apron in front of a Su-57 Felon, were three...
Share this story The number that matters is 47. That is how many fighters the United States Air Force is short of the minimum Congress wrote into law — not an aspiration, not a target, a statutory floor. And the service has been below it since at least May. The...
Share this story On Tuesday afternoon, four people sat down in front of the Swiss press in Bern and said the thing that everybody in the country had suspected for two years but nobody in government would confirm. There was never a fixed price for the F-35. The report...
Share this story US Central Command struck five Iranian crude oil carriers on Tuesday 8 September 2026 and sank at least one of them, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried twice in two days to hit a US Navy warship with ballistic missiles. Iran answered...
Share this story For four years the Swiss government told parliament and the public the same thing about its F-35A order: the price was fixed. On Tuesday 8 September 2026 the National Council’s Control Committee published a 95-page report saying that no blanket...
Share this story In April 1944 a Japanese submarine left Lorient carrying the plans for the most advanced interceptor in the world. It reached Singapore on 14 July. Twelve days later, on its way home, USS Sawfish sank it off the Philippines. A second boat carrying the...
Share this story In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won...
Share this story By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel...
Share this story Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately,...
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