Share this story At 9:13 on Monday morning, 5 October 2026, air traffic controllers in southern Nigeria lost contact with a Nigerian Air Force ATR 42 flying from Benin City to Lagos. Repeated calls on the radio went unanswered. Hours later, search teams found the...
Share this story Eighty-one. That is how many American aircraft have now been destroyed, lost or damaged in the war with Iran, according to an updated tally from the Congressional Research Service, Congress’s in-house think tank. The report was revised on 5...
Share this story A two-seat F-16 in desert camouflage climbed away from Lockheed Martin’s plant in Greenville, South Carolina, on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, carrying red Moroccan roundels on its wings. It was the first flight of the first F-16 Block 72 ever built,...
Share this story A fighter pilot’s own eyes, and even his own radar, only see a small piece of the sky. Somewhere on the ground, a controller in a dark room sees much more. Ground-controlled interception, or GCI, is the system that joins the two: radar stations...
Share this story On a radar screen, every aircraft looks much the same: a blip. It might be a friendly fighter coming home, an airliner, or an enemy bomber. Get it wrong one way and an enemy slips through. Get it wrong the other way and you shoot down your own people....
Share this story On 8 December 1964, at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana, a Convair B-58 Hustler sat on the ramp going nowhere. Cranes were rigged alongside it. Then one of its three crew stations fired itself off the aeroplane on a rocket, climbed away on a...
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 Most people have heard of blacking out in a fighter jet. Pull hard, the G builds, blood drains from the head, the world goes grey and then dark. But there is an evil twin that gets far less attention, and pilots respect it just as much. Push the stick...
Share this story Walk up to a fighter jet after a sortie and the smell hits you before anything else: warm kerosene. To most people, jet fuel is just jet fuel. To air forces and navies, it is a family of carefully specified liquids with names like JP-8, JP-5 and F-24,...
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 A fighter pilot coming home in bad weather wants to know two things: which direction is base, and how far away is it. For more than seventy years, the answer in military cockpits has come from a system with a slightly clumsy name: TACAN, short for...
Share this story Today the Indian Air Force flies Rafales, Su-30MKIs and Tejas fighters and is one of the largest air forces in the world. On Thursday it turns 94. Its first combat unit was four fabric-covered biplanes and a handful of young pilots on an airfield...
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