Share this story USS Theodore Roosevelt slipped out of San Diego on Sunday, 27 September, with no sailors manning the rails and no ceremony. A day later the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island followed with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard. According to...
Share this story Somewhere on the upper surface of every B-2 Spirit is a small round window that has nothing to do with the crew. Behind it sits a telescope that looks for stars. While the bomber flies, that system measures the angles to known stars and uses them to...
Share this story It is Thursday, so we did something we rarely do: we went back through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and read our own old websites. The oldest copy of migflug.com it holds dates from February 2005. Its page title was “MiG Flights...
Share this story The Lockheed U-2 was built around one idea: fly high enough and nobody can touch you. At 70,000 feet in the mid-1950s, that was true. No Soviet fighter could climb that high and stay there, and the first generation of Soviet missiles could not reach...
Share this story The bomb was supposed to fall away into the sky. Instead it came back up the chute and hit Staff Sergeant Henry Erwin in the face, burning at around 1,300°F (about 700°C). Within seconds he was blind, his clothes were on fire, and thick white...
Share this story On the night of 3 January 2026, the first helicopter into one of the most sensitive raids in recent American history was an Army MH-47 Chinook flown by Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. Minutes later he had four bullets in his leg. Seven weeks...
Share this story On the morning of 13 April 2019, the widest aircraft ever built rolled down the runway at Mojave in California, lifted two fuselages and six engines off the ground, and flew for two and a half hours. Its wings stretched 385 feet from tip to tip, wider...
Share this story A radar-guided missile announces itself. The radar that guides it lights up the target aircraft, and a radar warning receiver hears it. A heat-seeking missile gives no such courtesy. It homes passively on the heat of an engine, and the first sign of...
Share this story Squeeze the trigger in an F-16 and, a fraction of a second later, six barrels just behind the cockpit are spinning, and 20mm shells are leaving the aircraft at a rate of around 100 per second. The weapon is the M61 Vulcan, and for more than 65 years...
Share this story Not every successful fighter needs to be the best in the world. Some just need to be good enough, affordable and available. The JF-17 Thunder, built jointly by Pakistan and China, has turned that formula into an export success, and this year it became...
Share this story Some aces are remembered for their kills. Hubert Zemke is remembered for his pilots. As commander of the US Eighth Air Force’s 56th Fighter Group, he turned a unit of eager young P-47 Thunderbolt pilots into Zemke’s Wolf Pack, one of the...
Share this story At a quarter past three on the afternoon of 14 October 1973, Egyptian radar operators in the Nile Delta watched a formation of Israeli jets sweep in from the Mediterranean near Port Said. Over the next 53 minutes, the sky above the Delta filled with...
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