Share this story Look at almost any photo of a fighter on a real mission and you will see them: big, smooth, bullet-shaped pods hanging under the wings or the belly. They are not bombs or missiles. They are fuel tanks, and many of them are designed to be thrown away...
Share this story The A-4 Skyhawk was built to bomb things. It was small, light and nimble, and in Vietnam it hauled bombs and rockets into some of the most heavily defended airspace in history. Shooting down enemy fighters was the job of the Crusaders and Phantoms...
Share this story On the morning of 7 October 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force set out to do the thing it had been planning for years. It would destroy the Egyptian surface-to-air missile belt along the Suez Canal, and with it the...
Share this story Boeing can breathe out. On 1 October, members of SPEEA, the union that represents the company’s engineers and technical workers, voted to accept new four-year contracts, ending the threat of a strike that could have begun the following week. It...
Share this story Take a window seat over the wing of a Boeing 737 Next Generation and look just outboard of the engine. A short row of small blades stands on the upper skin, each angled across the airflow like a miniature keel. Passengers photograph them, post the...
Share this story On 7 July 1999, Ensign John Gay was on the highest deck of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation when an F/A-18C Hornet tore past wrapped in a white bell of cloud. The nose and canopy were clear. The rest of the jet seemed to be bursting out of a...
Share this story The fuel gauge read empty when the runway at Udorn, just across the Mekong in Thailand, came up in front of the nose. Maj. Leo Thorsness had pulled his F-105F back to idle with 70 miles to go, by his own account, and glided in. In the back seat, his...
Share this story On a single-pilot flight, one medical emergency in the left seat can leave everyone else aboard in an aircraft none of them can fly. Garmin’s answer, unveiled in 2019, is Autoland: press a button and the avionics handle everything from choosing...
Share this story For decades, some pilots who flew near big thunderstorms at night came home with a story they were reluctant to tell. Above the storm, well above the cloud tops where lightning has no business being, they had seen flashes of light shooting upward into...
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 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...
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