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...
Share this story A fighter lands, taxis clear, and stops. The canopy stays down. The pilot stays strapped in. The engine keeps running at idle while somebody walks a live fuel hose up to the aircraft and plugs it into a jet that is, by any normal safety standard, an...
Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one. It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the...
Share this story In 1952 a group of scientists at MIT was asked a straightforward question: how vulnerable are the United States and Canada to aerial bombing? Their answer was that a line of search radars should be built across the Arctic, as rapidly as possible. Two...
Share this story Put a Global Hawk and a Triton side by side and most people would call it the same aeroplane. Same enormous wing, same whale-shaped fuselage, same V-tail, same manufacturer. They are not the same aeroplane, and the difference comes down to one...
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Recent Comments