The highest-scoring American ace of the Vietnam War never flew the aeroplane. On 9 September 1972, Captain Charles B. DeBellevue shot down his fifth and sixth MiGs from the back seat of an F-4D Phantom. He was a weapon systems officer. The stick and throttles were...
Ukraine has spent this war building some of the densest electronic warfare cover on earth. Along much of the front line, GPS and GLONASS simply do not work. A drone that depends on satellite navigation arrives over the target having forgotten where it is....
A radar-guided missile announces itself. It has to: something has to illuminate the target, and the moment that happens the target knows it is being shot at.An infrared missile says nothing at all. It emits no signal, because it is not looking for a reflection. It is...
Smoking has been banned on commercial flights for decades. The signs are lit from pushback to gate. Tampering with a lavatory smoke detector will get you arrested.And yet every airliner rolling off the line at Toulouse or Renton this year has an ashtray fitted to the...
Every civil aircraft in the world carries a registration painted on its tail or fuselage, and the first character or two tells you where it is registered. American aircraft start with N. British with G. German with D. Swiss with HB.The obvious assumption is that...
The Battle of Britain has a famous date, and it is 15 September. That is Battle of Britain Day, the climax, the one in the calendar.It is not the day that cost the most. That was Sunday 18 August 1940, when the Luftwaffe made an all-out attempt to destroy RAF Fighter...
At 07:38 on the morning of 18 April 1942, a 70-ton Japanese patrol boat called the Nittō Maru spotted an American task force about 650 nautical miles east of Japan and got a radio message off before the cruiser Nashville sank her.That message ruined the plan. The...
Turkish Airlines does not have an aircraft problem. It has an engine problem, and it has spent the better part of a year using one to solve the other.A 150-aircraft Boeing 737 MAX order — announced with considerable ceremony after President Erdogan met President...
Korean Air signed the paperwork in Seoul this week, and the number on it is the largest in the airline’s history: roughly 60 trillion won, about $44.8 billion, for 103 Boeing aircraft and the engines to keep them running.This is the moment an announcement...
Air Combat Command’s director of operations stood up at the Air, Space and Cyber conference this week and said the F-35 “absolutely proved itself” in combat over Iran.He is right. He also attached a condition to the sentence that is doing an enormous...
For as long as the United States has had an independent Air Force, defending its airfields against attack from the sky has been somebody else’s job. Specifically, the Army’s.That arrangement is quietly collapsing, and at the Air, Space and Cyber conference...
A Russian drone crossed into Lithuanian airspace overnight on 15 September, and NATO fighters shot it down. That part has happened before — by the alliance air commander’s own count, at least six times now.What is new is that the officer responsible for...
Electronic warfare has always been an expensive aircraft’s privilege. The jamming pod on an EA-18G Growler is a large, power-hungry, individually precious thing, hung on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars and is flown by people you very much want...
Until now, Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury has been an air-to-air aircraft. It carries AIM-120 AMRAAMs, it flies alongside crewed fighters, and in July it became the first American collaborative combat aircraft to fire a missile in anger at a test range.At the Air, Space...
Three Mitsubishi F-2As landed at Air Force Station Jodhpur this month, and in doing so did something no Japanese fighter had ever done: deploy operationally to an Indian air base.Exercise Veer Guardian 26 runs from 9 to 21 September at Jodhpur and in the surrounding...
A Tomahawk leaves a destroyer’s deck, climbs, settles down to a few hundred feet and flies for up to 1,600 kilometres (870 miles) at 880 km/h (550 mph). At the end of that, it is expected to arrive at a specific building. Not a city. A building.The obvious...
The video is short and very loud. A Boeing 737 is shaking itself half to pieces somewhere over northeastern Iran, and above the heads of the passengers the ceiling is coming apart — long panels of interior lining folding down out of the roofline and dropping into the...