Share this story Picture an aircraft that does not sit on a runway but stands upright on its tail, nose pointed at the sky like a rocket. Around its waist spins a three-bladed wing, driven not by an engine in the fuselage but by ramjets screaming at the very tips of...
Share this story Somewhere over central France in the late 1950s, test pilot André Turcat pushes a strange delta-winged aircraft past the speed where a normal jet engine begins to gasp for air. And that is when the Nord Griffon comes alive. Behind him, a ramjet the...
Share this story The AGM-86B was designed when the Soviet Union still existed, gas cost about a dollar a gallon, and the B-52 crews loading it were younger than the bomber. More than four decades later, the United States has decided it cannot let the missile retire...
Share this story Two companies. One contract. Decades of consequences. Sometime around August 2026, the US Navy is expected to decide who will build the F/A-XX — its sixth-generation carrier fighter and one of the most important American aircraft programmes of the...
Share this story For twenty years, the Western answer to Chinese air power was simple: our jets are better. The F-22 and F-35 out-sense, out-stealth and out-network anything Beijing could field. That may still be true of any single aircraft. It may also be about to...
Share this story For decades, one rule has sat quietly at the centre of Western air power: a human being decides when a weapon kills. On June 30, 2026, Britain edged away from it. Buried inside a sweeping Defence Investment Plan — more than £5 billion for drones, the...
Share this story For months, Europe’s most ambitious fighter programme had a hole in the middle of it: the money. On July 3, 2026, that hole was filled. The United Kingdom, Italy and Japan signed a £4.6 billion ($6.1 billion) contract to push their sixth-generation...
Share this story It is 107 degrees on the range tower at Gila Bend, and a photographer is shielding his camera in the shade between passes so it will not overheat. Then the sound arrives — that unmistakable, chest-rattling BRRRT — and an A-10C Thunderbolt II drops out...
Share this story Tomorrow, as America’s 250th birthday flyovers thunder across the country, watch for the moment the crowd goes quiet. Four jets approach in perfect formation — and then one pulls up, streaming away from the others, climbing alone toward...
Share this story On 7 August 1942, over an island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in...
Share this story On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 280 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic...
Share this story Just after eight on the morning of 29 April 1975, American Radio Service in Saigon interrupted its programming to announce that the temperature was “105 degrees and rising.” Then it played White Christmas. In a city where it never snows,...
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