Share this story An airliner fuselage contains something in the order of a million rivets. Each one is a hole drilled through the skin, which is to say a stress concentration deliberately introduced into a pressure vessel, repeated a million times. A welded fuselage...
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story The Boeing 737 MAX spent almost two years grounded worldwide after two crashes killed everybody on board both aircraft. Its reputation has never entirely recovered, whatever the safety record since. The United States Air Force is going to buy one, and...
Share this story The United States fired 1,100 JASSMs at Iran in the first 39 days of the war. That is not a stockpile being drawn down. That is a stockpile being emptied. Lockheed Martin’s answer, unveiled this week, is not a better missile. It is a missile you...
Share this story The crew were already aboard. The maintenance team was about to launch the jet. Then the base alarm went red and everybody ran for a bunker. When they came back out, the KC-135 Stratotanker was smoking, punched full of shrapnel holes, and sitting on...
Share this story The Su-27 and the MiG-29 were designed in the same country, in the same decade, against the same American threat. They were never supposed to meet. They met exactly once, in February 1999, over a stretch of scrub on the border between Ethiopia and...
Share this story The F-35’s problem was never thrust. It was electricity, and the heat that comes with it. On 15 September 2026, Pratt & Whitney announced from East Hartford that it had completed the Risk Reduction Design Review for the F135 Engine Core Upgrade...
Share this story Israel’s F-35s have been flying the hardest missions of the last two years with somebody else’s bombs. That is about to change. Rafael Advanced Defense Systems announced at the Air, Space & Cyber conference on 15 September 2026 that it is...
Share this story Ukraine has spent this war building some of the densest electronic warfare cover on earth. Along much of the front line, GPS and GLONASS simply do not work. A drone that depends on satellite navigation arrives over the target having forgotten where it...
Share this story A radar-guided missile announces itself. It has to: something has to illuminate the target, and the moment that happens the target knows it is being shot at.An infrared missile says nothing at all. It emits no signal, because it is not looking for a...
Share this story Electronic warfare has always been an expensive aircraft’s privilege. The jamming pod on an EA-18G Growler is a large, power-hungry, individually precious thing, hung on an aircraft that costs tens of millions of dollars and is flown by people...
Share this story Until now, Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury has been an air-to-air aircraft. It carries AIM-120 AMRAAMs, it flies alongside crewed fighters, and in July it became the first American collaborative combat aircraft to fire a missile in anger at a test...
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