Share this story Stealth is an argument about angles. Shape an airframe so that almost everything a radar sends at it leaves in some other direction, coat what is left so that part of the remainder turns into heat, and the energy coming back to the transmitter falls...
Share this story In the first week of October 2025, Munich Airport shut down twice in roughly twenty-four hours. The first closure stranded around 3,000 passengers, the second about 6,500. Police mounted a large operation on both nights and found nobody. A week...
Share this story In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. Air Force learned an awkward lesson. Its laser-guided bombs were superb in clear skies, but dust, smoke, fog and cloud could blind them, and most of the bombs American aircraft dropped were still unguided. Air &...
Share this story The Kuwait theatre, early 1991, after dark. Two F-111Fs circle at medium altitude over a sixty-by-thirty-mile box of desert. In the right seat, a weapon systems officer stares at a small black-and-white screen where the sand has gone cool and grey and...
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story Ten years ago tonight, at about seven in the evening on 9 October 2016, the destroyer USS Mason was north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea when two missiles came off the Houthi-held coast of Yemen. Mason fired two SM-2s and an Evolved...
Share this story At 13:20 UTC on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 in Malaysia Airlines colours was cruising at 33,000 feet over the wheat fields of the Donetsk region, a little under three hours out of Amsterdam. The cockpit voice recorder was running. The crew had no...
Share this story Every time a drone shuts an airport, the same explanation appears within hours: the things are simply too small for radar to see. It is a tidy story. It is also wrong, and the measurement literature has been saying so for a decade. A DJI Phantom 3 and...
Share this story At Naval Air Station Whiting Field in Florida, a winging ceremony builds to one moment: family members step forward and pin a small gold badge on the chest of a newly graduated naval aviator. Years of flight training come down to that. In April 2026,...
Share this story On 7 July 1962, Georgy Mosolov flew a sleek Soviet delta-winged jet down a measured course twice, once in each direction, and averaged 2,681 kilometres per hour. That made it the fastest aircraft in the world. The paperwork sent to the Fédération...
Share this story In January 1956, Kelly Johnson walked into the Pentagon with an offer the Air Force could not refuse. The man who had just built the U-2 proposed a successor that would cruise at Mach 2.5 and nearly 100,000 feet, and he promised the first of two...
Share this story The Gripen E is a Swedish fighter with an American heart. Its engine is a General Electric F414, the same family that powers the Super Hornet. On 8 October 2026, Saab and GKN Aerospace signed an agreement that gives Sweden a bigger hand in looking...
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