Share this story The white jet with the blue-and-yellow tail sat on the apron at Chișinău on Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to go. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Oslo that evening for the funeral of King Harald V, a state occasion with more than 150 inbound...
Share this story For thirty-odd years, the Oregon Air National Guard had exactly one job: shoot down the other guy. Its F-15 C-models were pure air-superiority machines, and the wing was very good at it. Bombing was somebody else’s problem. On 27 August 2026, an...
Share this story The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama:...
Share this story Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to...
Share this story Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged...
Share this story Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person...
Share this story The story usually goes like this. Germany built a wooden night fighter to match the de Havilland Mosquito. It was fast and it worked. Then the RAF bombed the single factory making the special glue that held it together, the substitute adhesive was...
Share this story In 1949, English Electric wanted to build a supersonic fighter with sixty degrees of wing sweep. Nobody in the world had flown a wing swept that far. The Royal Aircraft Establishment thought it would be uncontrollable at low speed, and said so. There...
Share this story On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British...
Share this story In 1982, forty years after the last one made sense, a Soviet design bureau flew a jet attack aircraft with a rear gunner. Not a token installation. A proper remotely-controlled tail turret with a twin-barrelled 23 mm cannon, aimed by a second crewman...
Share this story Every airborne early warning aircraft in the world looks broadly the same: a transport or an airliner with an enormous rotating dish balanced on struts above the fuselage. The Hawkeye does it. The Sentry does it. Even GlobalEye, which uses a fixed...
Share this story In January 1943, Allied aircraft in New Guinea flew 416 sorties against a single Japanese convoy and sank two ships. Six weeks later, over three days in the Bismarck Sea, the same air force attacked another convoy and sank all eight transports and...
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