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 On a spring morning at Bordeaux-Mérignac in 1971, a sleek twin-jet lifted off carrying the hopes of the French aircraft industry. Marcel Dassault had built fighters that governments queued up for. Now he was going after Boeing, on...
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 For weeks it was described in the careful language of an open investigation: a “suspicious object,” a “security incident,” a drone of unknown origin. On Tuesday, Germany dropped the hedging. Standing before reporters in Berlin,...
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 For most of a century, an airliner was a machine made of aluminium — hundreds of thousands of sheets, frames and rivets bolted into a metal tube. Then Boeing rolled out the 787 Dreamliner, and the industry’s most fundamental building...
Share this story Here is a problem every fighter pilot eventually faces: you are behind an enemy jet, you have the advantage — and you are going too fast. Keep pulling and you will rocket right past him, handing him your tail. Ease off and he escapes. The...
Share this story In the early 1950s, neutral Sweden set out to build a supersonic interceptor unlike anything else in the world — a fighter with a strange, folded ‘double-delta’ wing. It was such a radical idea that no one could be sure the shape...
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 You cannot see it, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. Behind every aircraft that is making lift trail two invisible tornadoes of spinning air — wake turbulence. Fly into the wake of a big jet at the wrong moment and a smaller aircraft...
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...
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