Share this story It is 21 October 1929, and 169 people are about to do something no group of human beings has ever done: leave the ground together, in a single aircraft. On the surface of Lake Constance sits the reason — a flying boat so vast that the men...
Share this story On the morning of 2 September 1958, a four-engined transport drones eastward through the clear sky near the Turkish-Soviet border. To anyone who glanced up, it is just a C-130 Hercules — an unglamorous cargo hauler. It is not. Tail number 60528...
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
Share this story There are 21 B-2 Spirits in the world, and on any given day most of them are sitting in climate-controlled hangars in Missouri. So when one of these $2-billion flying wings turns up on the far side of the planet, it is never a coincidence. It is a...
Share this story For all its sophistication, the F-35 has carried an awkward secret: it could not sink a ship without compromising the one thing it is famous for. Any missile big enough to threaten a modern warship had to hang under the wings — and the moment it...
Share this story Somewhere over western Maryland on Saturday, a private pilot was having an ordinary flight — right up until a fighter jet appeared off the wingtip. Around 12:20 p.m. on 20 June 2026, a small general-aviation aircraft wandered into a Temporary...
Share this story Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of...
Share this story British defence programmes are not, as a rule, famous for speed. The Ajax armoured vehicle spent eight years mired in delay; the RAF’s Wedgetail radar aircraft arrived three years late. So when three new long-range strike weapons go from a sheet...
Share this story Here is America’s hypersonic problem in one sentence: the missiles work, but the factory doesn’t. The United States has spent years and billions proving it can build weapons that scream through the sky at more than five times the speed of...
Share this story Hunting a modern submarine is one of the most demanding tasks in military aviation. It means hours of patient, fuel-hungry orbits over empty ocean, listening for a contact that may never appear. It is precisely the kind of dull, exhausting,...
Share this story For sixty years, the answer to the question “what does Vietnam fly?” has been simple: whatever Moscow sold it. MiGs, then Sukhois — a proud, entirely Russian air force. In 2026, for the first time, that answer is genuinely in doubt,...
Share this story At Aero India 2025, on a warm February morning at Yelahanka Air Force Station near Bengaluru, a small boy tips his head all the way back. Above him a Russian Su-57 hauls itself into a vertical climb, rolls over the top, and falls back toward the...
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