The last A-10 ever built flew the last Weapons School sortie on 18 August. Four months earlier the Air Force extended the Warthog to 2030 – after closing its depot, its pilot school and its engine line.
Great Circle Routes: Why Pacific Flights Curve North Past Alaska
Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off the Aleutians,...
Airplane Oxygen Masks: How Long They Last and Why They Get Hot
The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell that in any other...
Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
On 6 November 1943 a German fighter pilot logged thirteen victories in seventeen minutes. Erich Rudorffer flew more than 1,000 missions, was shot down sixteen times, and died in 2016 at 98 — and his totals are a case study in what wartime claim records are and are not.
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
A carrier deck is 300 metres long and a loaded fighter needs a kilometre. The world settled on two answers: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the runway. How CATOBAR, STOBAR and STOVL really differ.
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Every radar looking for you has to shout to do it. How the radar warning receiver listens, sorts the noise into individual threats, and why it was invented over North Vietnam in 1965.
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
The helmet-mounted display let fighter pilots stop pointing the aeroplane at the target. From South African Mirages and the MiG-29 to JHMCS and the F-35 that flies with no HUD at all.
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and put out chaff....
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate in your face. So a...
David McCampbell: Nine Kills in a Single Mission
The Hellcat came aboard the wrong carrier, with two rounds left in six machine guns, and had to be hauled off the arrestor wire by hand because the engine had stopped and there was no fuel left to restart it. The pilot had just shot down nine aeroplanes. It remains...
Delta Returns to Monterey: New LAX and Salt Lake Routes
Delta has not flown to Monterey since 2008. From 19 December it will fly there twice a day from Los Angeles and once a day from Salt Lake City. The airline announced three new domestic routes on Friday, two of them serving a small coastal California airport it walked...
GHOST-R: The Pentagon Buys Satellites That Can Chase
Most reconnaissance satellites sit in one orbit and photograph the ground. The two the Pentagon just ordered are designed to move, and to photograph each other's neighbours. On 18 September the Defense Innovation Unit announced that Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly...
NATO Chiefs in Copenhagen: We Are Ready to Buy at Scale
Defence conferences usually produce communiqués. This one produced a shopping list. NATO's 32 chiefs of defence met in Copenhagen on 18 and 19 September for the alliance's annual Military Committee Conference, and the message they sent afterwards was aimed...
Skytrax 2026: Singapore Airlines Takes a Sixth World’s Best
On Friday evening at the Langham Hotel in London, Singapore Airlines was named the World's Best Airline for the sixth time in the history of the Skytrax World Airline Awards. Qatar Airways, last year's winner and a nine-time holder of the title, took second. Cathay...
Black Hawk Contract: 16 More UH-60Ms Keep Stratford Running
The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk first flew in 1974. The company has been building them for the US Army since 1978. On Friday, Connecticut's congressional delegation announced that the line at Stratford will keep running for another two years at least. The Army has...
Changi East: Singapore Opens a Runway Built for Fighters
At midnight on Friday, Singapore's airfield map changed. A 3,660-metre runway that had been quietly under construction on the eastern edge of Changi became operational, and it belongs to the air force. Runway 03/21 at Changi Air Base (East) went live at 1600 UTC on 17...
Pikes Peak Airshow: Flying the F-35A Demo at 6,200 Feet
Every airshow demonstration you have ever watched was flown to a script written at sea level and then adjusted. At Colorado Springs this weekend, the adjustment is large. The Pikes Peak Regional Airshow is running today, the second of two days at Colorado Springs...