Share this story At a quarter to three in the afternoon on 18 December 1972, the concrete at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, began to shake. The first Boeing B-52 Stratofortress released its brakes, eight engines trailing black smoke from water-injected takeoff power,...
Share this story The morning of 5 May 1935 smelled of dust, spring grass and engine oil. On a new airfield outside Ankara, the young Turkish Republic was opening a flight school with the kind of ceremony it loved best: gliders wheeling against the Anatolian sky,...
Share this story At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard,...
Share this story At 07:55 on the morning of 18 April 1988, a voice crackled from the destroyer USS Merrill across the VHF band, first in Farsi, then in English: the occupants of the Sassan gas and oil separation platform had five minutes to leave. On the steel decks...
Share this story Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air...
Share this story Last week we walked you through the sustainment data fight simmering between Boeing and the Air Force over the T-7A Red Hawk. Seven days later, the Government Accountability Office showed up with receipts. GAO’s Weapon Systems Annual Assessment,...
Share this story Commercial satellite imagery has revealed two hardened structures of an unfamiliar type at China’s most important missile test and training complex, and their geometry does not match anything previously catalogued there. The structures, at the...
Share this story When we wrote last week that NATO’s next radar jet would be Swedish, the news still wore the modest clothing of a Reuters exclusive. On Tuesday in Ankara, it acquired numbers, signatures and a price tag. Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed...
Share this story The sirens came before the sunrise. In Manama’s old quarters and along Kuwait City’s waterfront towers, the same rising wail that Gulf residents have learned by heart this year pulled families out of bed and into stairwells in the small...
Share this story Six years ago the United States took Turkey’s F-35s away. The jets Ankara had already paid for went into storage in the Arizona desert, Turkish pilots were sent home from Luke Air Force Base, and roughly 100 stealth fighters on order evaporated....
Share this story Eighty targets. One night. That is CENTCOM’s answer to Iran shooting at oil tankers again. Overnight into Wednesday, US forces worked their way down a target list across southern Iran: air defense systems, command-and-control networks, coastal...
Share this story On a summer day in 1965, workers and fishermen along the Ob River near Novosibirsk heard a scream of jet engines and looked up just in time to see something their minds could barely accept: a MiG-17 fighter, flashing low over the water — and then...
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