Share this story Every Su-27 Flanker has a tail that does not quite end. Between the two big engine exhausts, the centre of the fuselage keeps going, a long pointed boom sticking out behind the jet like a sting. Spotters call it the “stinger”, and it is...
Share this story Look at almost any photo of a fighter on a real mission and you will see them: big, smooth, bullet-shaped pods hanging under the wings or the belly. They are not bombs or missiles. They are fuel tanks, and many of them are designed to be thrown away...
Share this story Look a MiG-21 in the face and the first thing you see is a hole with a cone in it. The whole nose of the aircraft is one big round air intake, and sitting in the middle of it, like the stopper in a bottle, is a pointed cone. That cone is not...
Share this story The A-4 Skyhawk was built to bomb things. It was small, light and nimble, and in Vietnam it hauled bombs and rockets into some of the most heavily defended airspace in history. Shooting down enemy fighters was the job of the Crusaders and Phantoms...
Share this story On the morning of 7 October 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force set out to do the thing it had been planning for years. It would destroy the Egyptian surface-to-air missile belt along the Suez Canal, and with it the...
Share this story Kazakhstan’s second Airbus A400M has its paint on. Airbus released photographs on 1 October of the airlifter at its final assembly line in Seville, Spain, finished in a glossy grey scheme with “Kazakhstan Air Force” on the forward...
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 Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1951, the Indian Air Force formed a new squadron equipped with Harvard trainers. Today No. 17 Squadron, the Golden Arrows, flies the Rafale out of Ambala, and on 1 October 2026 it celebrated its platinum jubilee...
Share this story Turkey’s stealth fighter is about to fly again, this time in the form it is meant to be built in. Speaking at the TEKNOFEST Southeast technology festival on 2 October, Turkish Aerospace (TUSAŞ) general manager Mehmet Demiroğlu said all system...
Share this story India’s biggest fighter deal in a generation has a deadline. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said on 1 October that the bids for 114 more Dassault Rafale jets for the Indian Air Force are being evaluated, and that New Delhi expects to reach...
Share this story Russia lost a helicopter and its crew over its own territory on the evening of 1 October. If the reports coming out of the Voronezh region are right, the missile or the shells that brought it down came from a Russian fighter. According to Telegram...
Share this story France has put a date on its first robot wingman. In 2028 the French Air and Space Force plans to fly a Rafale together with an uncrewed collaborative combat aircraft, a so-called loyal wingman, in a first crewed-uncrewed test flight. The plan was...
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