Share this story The footage is grey and silent. A drone’s electro-optical camera holds a small boat in its crosshairs somewhere in the middle of the Black Sea; a laser spot blooms on the hull; the picture shudders. To anyone who lived through the spring of...
Share this story The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is...
Share this story In a hangar outside Bengaluru, the most important aircraft India has built in a generation is being readied for the moment that matters most: leaving the ground. The Tejas Mk2 — bigger, sharper and far more capable than the little fighter that...
Share this story A catapult launch is one of the most violent things in aviation: zero to flying speed in two seconds, a punch that rattles teeth and bends steel. The General Atomics Mojave skips it entirely. This is a drone big enough to carry missiles — and it...
Share this story For decades, America built cruise missiles like fine watches: exquisite, devastating, and so expensive you could only afford a handful. The Rusty Dagger is the opposite philosophy bolted under a wing — cheap, simple, turbojet-powered, and meant...
Share this story Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the...
Share this story On a grey June morning at the ILA Berlin air show, the most ambitious warplane Europe never built quietly ceased to exist. The Future Combat Air System — FCAS, or SCAF to the French — was meant to give France, Germany and Spain a...
Share this story “I feel the need — the need for speed.” “Talk to me, Goose.” Four decades after Top Gun first lit up the screen, those lines still make grown adults want to sprint to the nearest aircraft carrier. And almost all of them,...
Share this story Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle...
Share this story On 20 June 1951, over the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler did something no pilot had ever done. As his stubby little research jet, the Bell X-5, climbed away from the desert floor, he reached for a...
Share this story It is the middle of the night somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, and a four-engine turboprop is flying low and slow above the black water. Inside, a Navy flight officer hunches over a screen, watching a pattern of floating microphones he has just...
Share this story It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the...
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