The people of the Haslital have been asking a reasonable question since 2022: what will an F-35 actually sound like when it takes off from the valley they live in? The Swiss Air Force and armasuisse agreed to answer it the sensible way, by flying an F/A-18 and an F-35...
Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales. China’s J-20 is...
At 18:51 on the evening of 8 September, a Boeing 737-8 registered YR-BGO touched down at Henri Coandă in Bucharest, having flown in directly from the United States. It is the first 737 MAX Tarom has ever operated, and the first in Romania. Boeing, Tarom and the lessor...
Geostationary orbit is 36,000 km up, which is far enough that the satellites parked there appear not to move at all. It is where the most valuable military hardware in space lives: communications relays, missile-warning satellites, intelligence platforms. It is also,...
Ukraine spent two years building the one capability that reaches deep into Russia and actually hurts. On Sunday, the President of the United States asked it to stop using that capability on the target it works best against. Speaking to reporters at his Doonbeg golf...
Russia stopped building the Tupolev Tu-95 in 1992 and scrapped the tooling three years later. That single fact is what makes the satellite imagery coming out of Engels-2 worth paying attention to. On the night of Friday 28 August, Ukraine’s SBU struck the strategic...
Air Force basic training now includes a task that would have been unthinkable for a recruit ten years ago: walk up to a fighter, hang a missile on it, and do it as a team you organised yourself. The Air Base Training Range at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland is nearly...
Air Force Global Strike Command has published a progress report on its effort to fix bomber readiness, and it contains one conspicuous absence: any mission capable rate. The North Star Readiness Campaign began in the summer of 2025 and reached its first anniversary...
There was no flypast for this one. No water cannon, no speeches, no crowd on the ramp at Cherry Point. Marines took the wings off it, pulled the classified boxes out, put it on a flatbed and drove it to Florida. The aircraft is BuNo 166288, modex WP-18, and it is the...
For most of a decade, France told itself a story about the 2040s in which the Rafale was a bridge to something else. That something else was FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System, and in June it broke apart. Which leaves Dassault with an aircraft...
For five months the United States Air Force has said almost nothing about the man it went back for. He has no name in the public record. He has a call sign, and that is deliberate: Dude 44 Bravo, the weapons systems officer of an F-15E Strike Eagle that came apart...
Just after nine on Saturday morning, a nine-seat business jet greased onto a runway built for heavy bombers. The pilot had been aiming for a quiet private airfield in the Cotswolds. He got the United States Air Force instead. The aircraft was D-CJMK, a Cessna 560XLS+...
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