Share this story Some Cold War weapons were terrifying. A few were beautiful. And then there was the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 — a machine that looked like a flying saucer had mated with a submarine, and was built, in all seriousness, to stalk and kill American nuclear...
Share this story Autumn, 1933. On a grass airfield outside Kharkiv, a shape rolls out of its hangar that looks less like an aeroplane and more like a building that has decided to fly. Its wing stretches 53 metres from tip to tip — thick enough for a grown man to walk...
Share this story The first thing the crowd at Zhukovsky hears is the noise; the second thing it notices is that something is badly wrong with the wings. A dark, whale-nosed fighter comes howling low across the airfield, and its wings — unmistakably, impossibly —...
Share this story A World Cup is, among many other things, an enormous logistics problem with a ball in the middle of it. The 2026 edition — the first hosted jointly by the United States, Canada and Mexico, spread across 16 cities and three countries — is the largest...
Share this story When an airline picks a new long-haul jet, it usually picks a side. Boeing or Airbus. Dreamliner or A350. The engineering, the training, the spare parts, the pilot type-ratings — everything gets simpler when you commit to one family. Philippine...
Share this story For most of the last five years, the Boeing-versus-Airbus delivery race wasn’t a race at all. Crisis after crisis — the 737 MAX grounding, a pandemic, a factory-quality reckoning after a door plug blew off a jet in flight — left Boeing limping...
Share this story The first time you hear it, you feel it before you understand it — a deep, rising howl that climbs the back of your neck and rattles your chest as a vast triangular shadow sweeps overhead. For generations of British airshow-goers, that sound meant one...
Share this story It may be the most beautiful aircraft the United States Navy ever sent to sea: long, impossibly sleek, twin-finned and built to sprint at twice the speed of sound off a carrier deck. The North American A-5 Vigilante looked like it had arrived from a...
Share this story In the first months of the Pacific War, the Mitsubishi Zero was a nightmare. It could out-climb, out-turn and out-accelerate the stubby Grumman Wildcats the U.S. Navy sent against it, and American pilots who tried to fight it on its own terms —...
Share this story To drop bombs on Tripoli for twelve minutes, the U.S. Air Force flew for thirteen hours. Not because the target was far in a straight line — it was a routine Mediterranean hop from bases in England — but because almost every ally in between refused to...
Share this story At a quarter to eight on the morning of 5 June 1967, Egyptian air-defence officers were changing shifts, the dawn patrol had landed, and hundreds of Soviet-built fighters sat parked in neat rows across eighteen airfields. Within roughly three hours,...
Share this story A fighter is only as dangerous as the distance it can cross. On paper, America’s new F-47 is the longest-legged fighter the United States has ever built — and over the one map that matters most, the Western Pacific, it still comes up short. China’s...
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