It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
On April 25, 1982, a collection of British helicopters did something that hadn’t been done since World War II: they put a submarine out of action from the air. The target was ARA Santa Fe, an Argentine submarine caught on the surface near South Georgia Island...
On August 17, 1943, the United States Eighth Air Force launched what would become one of the most devastating bombing missions in the history of aerial warfare. The target was Germany’s ball bearing industry — a chokepoint that Allied planners believed could...
On May 10, 1970, an SR-71A Blackbird designated 61-7969 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. It would never return. What happened in the skies over Southeast Asia that day remains one of...
Editor’s Update (June 2026): Malaysia’s Cabinet officially cancelled the planned purchase of Kuwait’s retired F/A-18C/D Hornets on 6 February 2026. The background analysis below on Malaysia’s fighter gap and the strategic rationale for the deal...
Share this story On the evening of 4 March 1957, a US Navy patrol blimp lifted off the apron at Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and pointed itself east, towards the Atlantic Ocean. Its envelope was 343 feet long. Its registration was Bureau Number...
Share this story On 23 February 2004, the Acting Secretary of the Army — a former Senate staffer and Vietnam veteran named Les Brownlee — stood at a Pentagon podium with the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, and announced the cancellation of...
Share this story If you want to know what a country is really planning, don’t read the press releases. Look at the parking lots. That’s been the quiet refrain among open-source defence analysts for two years now, as a small army of nerds armed with...
Share this story Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in...
Share this story If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling...
Share this story It looks like a Soviet defector’s nightmare. Four giant ducted fans, each two metres in diameter, mounted on the corners of a stubby fuselage, tilting between horizontal and vertical flight. The whole machine hangs from those four fans like a...
Share this story If a fighter pilot ever has to pull the handle between his knees, the next quarter of a second of his life can take as much as two centimetres off his height. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. By the time the canopy clears and the seat is climbing on...
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