Share this story In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the...
Share this story Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and...
Share this story In June 1981, a young Israeli pilot flew the most exposed position in one of the most audacious air raids in history. Twenty-two years later, that same man carried a Torah scroll that had survived a concentration camp into orbit — and never came...
Share this story It was a routine training flight on a grey winter afternoon. Three American airmen took off from Wiesbaden in an unarmed little jet, expecting to be back in three hours. They never came home. The shootdown of a U.S. Air Force T-39 Sabreliner over East...
Share this story Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the...
Share this story On the last day of 1986, a sleek new fighter lifted off from a runway in Israel and climbed into a clear desert sky. It handled beautifully. It was, by many accounts, world-class. Eight months later, its own government voted to kill it — by a...
Share this story It looked like a beer barrel with wings, and the Swedes said so themselves — they called it Flygande Tunnan, the “Flying Barrel.” But behind that comical shape hid a serious pioneer: the first swept-wing fighter to enter squadron...
Share this story Line the Tupolev Tu-128 up next to the bombers it was built to shoot down, and you might struggle to tell the hunter from the prey. At nearly 30 metres long and around 43 tonnes, this Soviet interceptor was bigger and heavier than many of the aircraft...
Share this story In 1997, the Russian government formally cancelled the fighter that was supposed to answer the American F-22. Three years later, in front of an invited crowd at Zhukovsky, that cancelled fighter took off anyway. The Mikoyan 1.44 is one of...
Comparte esta historia El martes 18 de agosto de 2026, una multitud muy inusual se congregó en el cielo sobre el norte de Polonia y el Báltico, y todos los observadores de vuelos serios de Europa se detuvieron a observar. En un gran ejercicio aéreo de la OTAN liderado por Estados Unidos, un denso grupo de aeronaves aliadas...
Share this story A single photograph, and the internet decided China had built a mirror. Over the weekend of Aug. 19, 2026, fresh images of a PLA Navy J-35 carrier fighter in flight rocketed around military-watcher circles. Instead of the usual matte grey, the...
Comparte esta historia. Una cosa es traer un avión de combate a casa sano y salvo, y otra muy distinta es traerlo apuntando en la dirección equivocada. En la mañana del 18 de agosto de 2026, un F-15J Eagle de la Fuerza Aérea de Autodefensa de Japón aterrizó en la pista 36L del aeropuerto de Naha, en la isla de...
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