Share this story Picture the pitch meeting. It is 1948, the jet age is barely out of diapers, and someone at the U.S. Navy stands up and says: what if the fighter took off from the ocean? No carrier. No runway. Just a supersonic delta-wing jet, water-skiing into the...
Share this story Somewhere over the Channel, in a slick of oil and cold grey swell, a fighter pilot is treading water and losing the argument with hypothermia. He hears it before he sees it: a slow, clattering drone, an aeroplane that looks less like it is flying and...
Share this story Picture a beer keg with wings. Now bolt a nine-cylinder radial to the front, wedge a nervous pilot in behind it, and paint a red star on the side. Congratulations: you have just imagined the Polikarpov I-16, the stubbiest, twitchiest, most quietly...
Share this story In the late 1930s the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was, briefly, the most modern airliner in the sky: a clean, four-engined monoplane that could cross an ocean without stopping. Within three years the same graceful airframe was ranging far out over the...
Share this story She was small, blonde and twenty-one, and she kept flowers in the cockpit. Not as a joke, not for a photograph — for herself. Somewhere over the churned earth of the Mius Front, in a Yak-1 with a pale lily painted near the nose, Lydia Litvyak...
Share this story Russian sources say the Su-35S has taken on a new and demanding job over Ukraine: hunting the radars that guide enemy air defences. Footage circulated on 22 August 2026 purports to show an Su-35 launching a Kh-31PM anti-radiation missile at a...
Share this story India’s most ambitious home-built fighter has drawn sharp criticism from an unlikely quarter: one of the officers who helped run the air force until weeks ago. Air Marshal Nagesh Kapoor, who stepped down as the Indian Air Force’s Vice...
Share this story For the first time, China has flown one of its heavyweight fighters to Africa. A formation of Shenyang J-16 strike jets touched down at an Egyptian air base early on 21 August 2026, opening the second edition of the “Eagles of...
Share this story Ukraine mounted one of its deepest strikes of the summer overnight on 22 August 2026, sending long-range drones more than 1,000 kilometres into Russia’s Samara region. By morning two sites were burning: the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery, part of...
Share this story Stand near an Antonov An-22 as it runs up its engines and you do not just hear it, you feel it. Four of the most powerful turboprop engines ever built spin eight enormous propellers, each blade sweeping a circle taller than a house, and the sound is a...
Share this story On a summer morning in 2024, thousands of people lined the shores of Vancouver Island to say goodbye to a 79-year-old giant. The Hawaii Mars, the largest flying boat still in the air anywhere in the world, lifted off the water one last time, escorted...
Share this story Most fighter jets are built to twist and turn. The MiG-31 Foxhound was built to do something far simpler and far more frightening: go very fast, in a straight line, and catch things nothing else could. Nearly half a century after its first flight, it...
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