Share this story On 17 June 2014, RAF Typhoons from 3 (Fighter) Squadron were scrambled to intercept four separate groups of Russian aircraft over the Baltic. The RAF’s own account of what they found reads like this: a Tu-22 Backfire bomber, four Su-27 Flankers,...
Share this story In February 1943 the German Air Ministry asked for a single-seat aircraft to attack invasion shipping. Henschel answered with something that looks, even now, like a mistake in the drawing: a small jet with a turbine bolted to its spine, wooden wings,...
Share this story On 19 May 1942 a four-engined bomber lifted off from Ramenskoye, outside Moscow, and turned west towards a continent that Germany controlled from the Atlantic to the Volga. In the fuselage, sitting on a bench in a heavy flying suit with an oxygen mask...
Share this story There is an aviation business that never appears at Farnborough. It buys fighter aircraft that no air force wants any more, from countries that need the money, and sells them to countries that are not allowed to buy weapons at all. On Wednesday a...
Share this story Dassault Aviation said on Monday that it has flown a Rafale carrying two new artificial intelligence systems, both designed to help the person in the cockpit rather than replace them. One was written in-house by Dassault’s own engineers. The...
Share this story On Tuesday a Korean fighter took off from a Korean factory, flown by a Korean air force major who had just signed for it, and landed at a Korean air base. Twenty-five and a half years after a president promised it, South Korea has handed its air force...
Share this story Three hundred metres. Forty-two seconds. On a map of Europe it would not register as a line. At 11:08 on Wednesday morning, a Russian Mi-8 helicopter flying out of Kaliningrad crossed the border north of the Polish town of Braniewo, stayed inside...
Share this story Nearly seventy airmen lined the flight line at Nellis Air Force Base on Tuesday morning and saluted an aeroplane. The A-10 Thunderbolt II lifted off into a cloudless Nevada sky, turned out over Las Vegas, and did not come back. That was the last...
Share this story At around noon on Wednesday, a fighter in full Royal Canadian Air Force markings lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, with an F-35C flying chase. Bilingual RCAF-ARC lettering on the intakes. A roundel. “Canada” behind the cockpit. A...
Share this story A man standing near the perimeter of RAF Valley on Wednesday morning watched a jet take off, the way he had watched hundreds before, and knew within a second or two that this one was wrong. By the time the aircraft had climbed to what he estimated at...
Share this story For sixteen years she was the most photographed privately owned jet in Britain: a Hawker Hunter painted banana yellow at the nose, fading through red and blue into deep-space black at the tail, with a scatter of stars down the fuselage. Airshow crowds...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
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