Share this story In the 1960s the Soviet Union had thousands of small airfields, and around a thousand of them were little more than grass strips under 700 metres long. The aircraft serving them were piston-engined relics: Lisunov Li-2s, Ilyushin Il-12s and Il-14s,...
Share this story High over Maryland, a grey Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II opened its belly in level flight and let go of a long white missile. It fell away cleanly, its rocket motor cold and its fins locked. Nobody fired anything. That was the point.On 5 November...
Share this story A grey JF-17 Thunder with the serial 09-109 on its tail, a bright red missile under its wing, and then a streak of flame. That is the clip the Pakistan Air Force released on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, to announce the first flight test of Fa’az,...
Share this story Walk up to a flying B-17 Flying Fortress at an American airshow and look at the fuselage beside the crew door. Somewhere near the entrance, in letters between two and six inches high, there will be a word. Most visitors never notice it. It is the...
Share this story On Monday in Athens, Greece signed for three Embraer KC-390 Millennium transports, with options for three more, to replace a Hellenic Air Force C-130H fleet that has been flying since the 1970s. Within hours the comment sections filled with the same...
Share this story The missile does not roar out of the tube. It pops. A small motor kicks it clear of the launcher, and only when the missile is several metres away does its main motor light with a crack and a streak of smoke. That gentle start is one of the tricks...
Share this story The certificate that makes a pilot legally employable arrives at 250 flight hours. The certificate a United States airline is required to hire arrives at 1,500. Between those two numbers sits a gap of 1,250 hours that nobody teaches you, nobody...
Share this story On 24 October 1974, a C-5A Galaxy flying over the Pacific let an intercontinental ballistic missile fall out of its cargo hold. The 86,000-pound Minuteman I dropped from 20,000 feet to about 8,000 feet. Then its first-stage motor lit, and a ten-second...
Share this story Walk up to almost any fighter on a museum flight line and look closely at the nose. On a Korean F-4E Phantom, the very tip is jet black. On plenty of other jets the nose cone is a subtly different grey from the fuselage behind it, as if it had been...
Share this story You have seen the video. A wing, stripped of its skin panels in places and bristling with instrumentation, is pulled upward by a forest of hydraulic jacks until the tips are somewhere near the roof. A number climbs on a screen. Then there is a bang...
Share this story China says it has launched a stealthy, jet-powered flying-wing combat drone off an amphibious assault ship and caught it again on the same deck. On Friday 30 October 2026, the People’s Liberation Army announced that its GJ-21 stealth drone had...
Share this story On 5 September 1983, a group of US Air Force F-4E Phantoms was crossing the Atlantic to Germany, refuelling from KC-135 tankers along the way. Halfway over, Major Jon “Ghost” Alexander’s Phantom began losing oil. What followed was...
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