Share this story In the mid-1950s, a needle-thin French aircraft with jet engines perched on its wingtips and a rocket motor in its belly clawed its way toward the edge of space, touching nearly twice the speed of sound and setting records for how fast a jet could...
Share this story In the winter of 1946, Britain was perhaps six months away from becoming the first nation to fly faster than sound. In a guarded hangar sat a small, bullet-shaped jet called the Miles M.52, all but finished, its test pilot chosen, its supersonic...
Share this story Imagine a fighter aircraft that cannot take off. It has no way to move under its own power on the runway, no way to build up speed, no way to leave the ground at all. To fly it, you must bolt it to the roof of an airliner, haul it up to altitude, and...
Share this story By the summer of 1944, London was under siege from a weapon no one could see coming until it was too late. The V-1 flying bomb — the “doodlebug” — buzzed across the Channel by the hundred, and its droning pulsejet was a sound Londoners learned to...
Share this story Half a century ago, the SEPECAT Jaguar screamed across the plains of northern Germany at treetop height, a nuclear bomb slung beneath its belly and the Warsaw Pact in its sights. France retired it in 2005. Britain let it go in 2007. Oman parked its...
Share this story On the morning of 24 September 1958, a flight of Nationalist Chinese F-86 Sabres was climbing over the Taiwan Strait when a formation of Communist MiG-17s slid past — a little higher and, on paper, the better aircraft. Then the Sabres did something no...
Share this story Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell...
Share this story Every so often a fighter comes along that wins its contest so completely that the argument simply stops. The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is that aircraft. It out-flew a rival prototype, rewrote what a fighter was supposed to do, and entered service as...
Share this story Dawn over Kadena, and the concrete is already trembling. Two Pratt & Whitney turbofans spool up behind a jet the size of a small barn, the pilot walks the throttles into afterburner, and for a heartbeat the whole world is noise. Then the nose...
Share this story The F-35 you see on the flight line today is not the F-35 its makers keep promising. The one they keep promising — the one bristling with new sensors, electronic-warfare gear and more than a dozen additional weapons — lives inside a modernization...
Share this story Most fighter pilots come up through the same narrow chute: flight school, a commission, a cockpit before they are old enough to rent a car without a surcharge. Kenneth Gilmore came up through a football program. Before he ever pulled Gs, he was...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada high desert, a young American fighter pilot rolls into a turn and sees something that should not exist. A stubby, silver dart is sliding into formation off his wing — snub nose, sharp delta, a red star where a national...
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