Share this story The Strait of Hormuz war widened over the weekend, and for once the most consequential fighting was not over Iran at all. It was over Jordan, where American Patriot batteries spent part of Monday morning shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles aimed...
Share this story Germany spent Tuesday accusing Russia of trying to blow up a Ukrainian freighter on German soil. Russia spent the hours that followed escalating its denial, first through its embassy in Berlin, then through Vladimir Putin himself. The sequence...
Share this story On 5 November 1938 three Royal Air Force bombers took off from Ismailia in Egypt and turned east. Two of them landed at Darwin in northern Australia about forty-eight hours later, having flown roughly 7,150 miles without stopping. It was a world...
Share this story In 1947 Avro proposed a bomber shaped like nothing the Royal Air Force had ever bought: a vast tailless delta with no fuselage worth the name, meant to carry a nuclear weapon at high altitude across a continent. It became the Avro Vulcan. There was a...
Share this story At 3:58 on the afternoon of 29 May 1951, a red P-51 Mustang lifted off from Bardufoss in northern Norway with one man in it and no radio navigation aids ahead of him worth the name. Charles Blair was going to fly over the North Pole to Alaska, alone,...
Share this story Between May and August 1972, an F-4 Phantom pilot from Reidsville, North Carolina was credited with shooting down five MiG-21s over North Vietnam. Every one fell to the AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided missile with a reputation so poor that crews joked...
Share this story Dropping a torpedo on a submarine has always required getting uncomfortably close to it. The aircraft has to fly to roughly where the submarine is, and a submarine is exactly the sort of thing that objects to being approached. The U.S. Navy now wants...
Share this story The U.S. Army just turned its workhorse troop taxi into a launch platform for autonomous killers. Footage released by Anduril on 31 August shows an H-60M Black Hawk rocket-launching an Altius-700 from an external pylon, the drone streaking away across...
Share this story Stand behind a jet at full power and the experience is less like hearing a machine than being shoved by one. A modern airliner engine can produce more than 100,000 pounds of thrust from a device with essentially no reciprocating parts — just a...
Share this story Kelly Johnson gave the Skunk Works the SR-71 and the U-2. But it was his successor, a chubby, wisecracking thermodynamicist named Ben Rich, who took an idea most engineers thought was absurd — an aircraft you couldn’t see on radar —...
Share this story When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51...
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell F3H Demon is remembered for what it led to. Underpowered, dangerous in its early years, and saddled with one of the worst engines in naval-aviation history, the Demon nonetheless taught its...
Recent Comments