Share this story The object was less than a millimetre long on the print. It sat on a photograph of a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, among thousands of other specks, and a woman in a Buckinghamshire country house looked at it through a magnifying glass and worked out...
Share this story The US Air Force has finally put a month on the T-7A. August 2027, fourteen aircraft, one squadron. After a programme that has slipped so often the dates stopped meaning much, that is a surprisingly specific thing to say out loud. Lt. Gen. Clark...
Share this story An airliner fuselage contains something in the order of a million rivets. Each one is a hole drilled through the skin, which is to say a stress concentration deliberately introduced into a pressure vessel, repeated a million times. A welded fuselage...
Share this story The US Space Force is the smallest armed service the United States has ever fielded. It is now planning to more than double, and the number it has quietly put on that ambition is bigger than the word “double” suggests. At the Air &...
Share this story A medium-altitude, long-endurance drone landed on a dirt track that tanks drive down, in the middle of a live-fire range, while a simulated battle was going on around it. Then it took off again and carried on with the mission. General Atomics...
Share this story Ukraine says it destroyed six Russian aircraft in one night, on the ground, at an airfield 160 kilometres from the front line. If the claim holds, it is among the heaviest single-night losses Russia has taken at one air base since the invasion began....
Share this story An F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the 149th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air National Guard came down in rural northern Michigan on Thursday afternoon. The pilot ejected and was recovered alive. That last sentence is the story. Everything else is...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye....
Share this story The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week,...
Share this story The Boeing 737 MAX spent almost two years grounded worldwide after two crashes killed everybody on board both aircraft. Its reputation has never entirely recovered, whatever the safety record since. The United States Air Force is going to buy one, and...
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