Share this story Claims about strikes deep inside Russia are cheap. Verification is not. This week the satellites caught up with two of them, and the pictures are unusually specific about what Ukrainian drones actually hit. At Millerovo air base in Rostov Oblast,...
Share this story The Airbus A320 has three hydraulic systems, and they are separate on purpose. Green, blue and yellow. Three reservoirs, three pressure sources, no fluid shared between them. The architecture exists so that no single failure can take away the flight...
Share this story Two Iranian ballistic missiles came off the rail on Saturday morning and went for a United States aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer. Both missed. Nobody aboard either ship was hurt. The answer arrived within hours, and it was not aimed...
Share this story The display had been running for barely two minutes. Thousands of people were standing along the fence line at Tanagra Air Base, north of Athens, cameras up, waiting for the noise that only a Phantom makes. Then the jet came out of a turn, low, and...
Share this story At about half past three on Friday afternoon, a Russian drone came down on a grey neoclassical block at 33 Volodymyrska Street in central Kyiv, directly across the road from St Sophia Cathedral. The building is the headquarters of the Security Service...
Share this story Switzerland ordered its Patriot air defence system in 2022 and expected the first fire unit to arrive in 2026. It is now 4 September 2026, nothing has arrived, and the workaround that was supposed to rescue the timetable has just fallen apart....
Share this story In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it. Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for...
Share this story In the summer of 1986 the largest aircraft in the world sat on a ramp at Lakehurst, New Jersey, three quarters of a mile from where the Hindenburg had burned. It was 343 feet long. It was a Navy blimp with four helicopters bolted underneath it. On 1...
Share this story On 24 November 1961, a machine that looked like somebody had bolted two helicopters to the wingtips of a transport aircraft lifted 16.4 tonnes to two and a half kilometres, set six world records in one flight, and landed thirty minutes later with its...
Share this story Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the...
Share this story The most important document in this story is a memo. It was written on 27 June 1972 by an engineer named Dan Applegate, it ran to a few pages, and it said clearly what was going to happen. Twenty months later it happened. Three hundred and forty-six...
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
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