Share this story Watch fighters take off from almost any air base in the world and you will notice something: they rarely go alone. They roll down the runway in pairs, climb out together and fly the whole mission as a team of two. In fighter slang, that pair is a...
Share this story Not every fighter mission is a dash to a target. A lot of the time, fighter pilots fly in circles. They take off, climb to a patch of sky, and orbit there for hours, burning fuel, refuelling from tankers and watching their radar. Nothing happens, and...
Share this story On Sunday morning the bombers simply left. One after another, the B-1B Lancers that had spent months flying out of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire lined up, took off and pointed west. By the end of the day, at least three of them were already on the...
Share this story A fighter jet is never more vulnerable than when it is parked. In the air it can manoeuvre, climb, jam and fire back. On the ground, with its pilot asleep and its tanks being filled, it is a very expensive target that cannot move. For most of the jet...
Share this story Twenty-five years ago this Wednesday, on the night of 7 October 2001, the first bombs of the war in Afghanistan began to fall. Some of them had been carried by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers that had flown all the way from Missouri, aircraft that would...
Share this story Twelve Strike Eagles set off across the Atlantic on Saturday, 3 October 2026, heading home to North Carolina after a deployment to the Middle East. Two of them ended the day in County Clare. One of the US Air Force F-15Es developed a fuel problem over...
Share this story A week ago it was the glitch that froze the Boeing 737 MAX 10’s certification. On Friday, 2 October 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration decided it was not a safety problem after all. A panel of FAA safety experts concluded that a software...
Share this story Nobody was at the controls, and nobody was meant to be. On 3 October 2026, a grey, shovel-nosed jet registered N444LX rolled out at Mojave Air and Space Port in California, took off, flew, and landed again entirely on its own. Northrop Grumman’s...
Share this story Tankers, airlifters and airborne radar aircraft are big, slow and impossible to hide. They are also, increasingly, the targets that very-long-range air-to-air missiles are built to kill. On 1 October the US Air Force moved to give them a better chance...
Share this story The tower told the Amazon jet it was cleared to land. It did not tell the crew what the wind was doing. Four minutes earlier, on another frequency, controllers had passed the gusts to someone else. That is one of the central findings in the National...
Share this story America’s Cold War missile-warning constellation went out with a workout. In September, during US Space Command’s Apollo Maneuvers 2026 live-fly exercise, Guardians of the 2nd Space Warning Squadron put the last two Defense Support Program...
Share this story At about 7:45 pm on Wednesday 30 September, a REACH Air Medical Services EC135 air ambulance lifted off from the Pebbly Beach heliport on Santa Catalina Island, about a mile from Avalon, carrying a patient to the mainland. Within moments it was in the...
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