Share this story For more than three decades, every Predator, Reaper and Gray Eagle that General Atomics sold was built by General Atomics. On Friday the company broke that habit for its most important new aircraft. The fuselage of the FQ-42 Vengeance, the US Air...
Share this story On Tuesday evening, somewhere over France and the Mediterranean, French two-seat Rafale B jets flew a mock nuclear strike with something they had never had before: British fighters guarding their flanks. The escorts were Eurofighter Typhoon FGR4s of...
Share this story On 24 October 1958, a slim silver delta with tricolour roundels pushed past Mach 2 in level flight, reaching Mach 2.2. No Western European aircraft had done it before. Nine years later, the same design would win one of the most decisive air campaigns...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Share this story A heat-seeking missile chases something it can feel: the hot exhaust of an engine. A radar-guided missile chases something it cannot see at all until a radar wave bounces off it. That difference is why radar missiles can kill from beyond visual range,...
Share this story The most successful pilot ever to fly the F-14 Tomcat never went to TOPGUN, never landed on a carrier and never fought for the U.S. Navy. He flew for Iran, against Iraq, in a war most Western readers barely remember.Jalil Zandi is credited with 11...
Share this story On the day Michael Wynne reported for active duty in August 1966, the news came through that his older brother had been shot down over Vietnam. Forty-two years later, the younger Wynne would leave the Air Force for the last time, as its civilian head,...
Share this story A carrier fighter is only as good as the deck it lands on, and India has bought a fighter designed for somebody else’s deck. Now the Indian Navy has started finding out exactly what that means.Defence sources told the news agency ANI, as...
Share this story Iran built Eagle 44 so that its warplanes could ride out an air war inside a mountain. In 2026, the mountain got its test. Now satellite images suggest the diggers never really stopped.Imagery taken by Planet Labs on 29 September 2026 and published by...
Share this story Some days the hardest part of flight training is the landing. On Thursday evening, 22 October 2026, two U.S. Air Force pilots in a T-6A Texan II decided, with expert advice from the ground, that the safest way to finish their flight was not to land at...
Share this story Counting aircraft from orbit is a strange way to follow a weapons programme, but with China it is often the only way. On 5 October 2026 a commercial satellite passed over Xi’an-Yanliang airfield in Shaanxi province and photographed four KJ-3000...
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