Share this story The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still...
Share this story On 11 June 1940, the people of Malta looked up at a sky suddenly full of Italian bombers and saw, rising to meet them, a handful of fabric-and-wire biplanes that looked like relics from the last war. They were relics. And for ten desperate days, they...
Share this story An offshore patrol vessel is, as a rule, a modest thing: a hull built for endurance, a single medium gun, a job description that runs to fisheries protection and chasing smugglers. The United Arab Emirates has looked at that formula and, politely,...
Share this story For nearly half a century, the growl of the A-10 Warthog was the soundtrack of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. On 29 July, that sound faded for good — and now the Air Force is moving fast to fill the silence with something very different. With the...
Share this story The U.S. Navy’s two great ocean-watchers already work as a pair. Now they are learning to talk directly to each other — and one of them is about to start taking orders straight from the other’s cockpit. On 5 August, Boeing and...
Share this story Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, an airport worker at Leipzig/Halle spotted something that should not have been there: a drone, sitting on the tarmac near the south runway, carrying an explosive device. It was resting a short distance from one of...
Share this story America has been building a missile so secret it barely shows its face in public. Now it is letting a friend hold it — and Australia gets to go first. On 6 August, at Exercise Pitch Black in Darwin, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister...
Share this story The Pentagon’s vision of cheap robot fighters flying shotgun for crewed jets took two big steps this week. One went forward. The other went straight into the Utah desert. Kratos Defense & Security Solutions has begun building the first...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 7 told the engineering story of the B-29 — the pressurised cabin, the burning engines, the Battle of Kansas. This piece asks the question that story leaves hanging: how did America...
Share this story Picture a single dirt runway hacked out of a jungle, ringed by palm stumps and bomb craters, with a handful of battered fighters parked in the mud. Every day it was bombed. Some nights it was shelled by battleships. And from it, a scratch force of...
Share this story It had a propeller at the back, a nose that tilted up to lob its cannon shells, and a seat that dropped its pilot out through the belly in an emergency so he would not be chopped to pieces by his own engine. It was nearly as long as a DC-3. And it was...
Share this story There was a stretch of sky between India and China so lethal that the men who flew it said you could navigate by the wrecks below. They called it the Hump — and for three years, an unbroken stream of transport planes crossed the highest...
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