Share this story Watch a MiG-29 line up and open the throttles, and something happens that no Western fighter does. The main air intakes shut. Two doors swing across the inlets, sealing them off, and the engines start breathing through rows of louvres that have popped...
Share this story From 5 to 9 October, passengers waiting for a holiday flight at Nuremberg will share the apron with four Eurofighter Typhoons. The airport is not being closed. The fighters are not visiting for an air display. They are there because the German air...
Share this story In February 1943 the German Air Ministry asked for a single-seat aircraft to attack invasion shipping. Henschel answered with something that looks, even now, like a mistake in the drawing: a small jet with a turbine bolted to its spine, wooden wings,...
Share this story On Tuesday a Korean fighter took off from a Korean factory, flown by a Korean air force major who had just signed for it, and landed at a Korean air base. Twenty-five and a half years after a president promised it, South Korea has handed its air force...
Share this story A fighter lands, taxis clear, and stops. The canopy stays down. The pilot stays strapped in. The engine keeps running at idle while somebody walks a live fuel hose up to the aircraft and plugs it into a jet that is, by any normal safety standard, an...
Share this story There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one. It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the...
Share this story You have heard the claim. The A-10’s gun is so powerful that firing it stops the aeroplane in mid-air. It does not. A burst costs the aircraft a few miles an hour in level flight. But the claim keeps circulating because the real numbers are almost as...
Share this story Spangdahlem sits on a hilltop in the Eifel, thirty kilometres north of Trier, in country that is green and quiet and mostly sheep. It exists because in 1951 somebody drew a line at the Rhine and decided that American fighters needed to be west of it....
Share this story The pilot described it as the jet just stopping in mid-air. On 3 December 2025 a Thunderbirds F-16 was flying loops and rolls over the California desert. The pilot, an instructor with nearly 1,400 hours, had peeled off from the delta formation during...
Share this story For six months the accounting was guesswork, satellite imagery and leaks. Last week the United States government published its own figures, twice. On 14 September the Pentagon’s Lead Inspector General delivered its first quarterly report to Congress...
Share this story The Royal Canadian Navy bought the Grumman Tracker for one reason above all others: it was short enough to fit on HMCS Bonaventure. Then de Havilland Canada built ninety-nine of them at Downsview, the only Canadian-built aircraft the RCN ever ordered....
Share this story Photographs circulating from Iran this week show a scatter of scorched composite panels, burnt wiring and a small turbojet, laid out on bare ground. Iranian sources say it was shot down. What it is, is more interesting than how it got there. The parts...
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