Share this story Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations...
Share this story In September 2020 Swiss voters approved a new fighter fleet by 8,515 votes out of more than three million cast. It was the narrowest margin in modern Swiss defence politics, and the case for it rested heavily on one reassuring word: the price was...
Share this story Air defence against a Shahed-type drone is, more often than not, a human being looking up. The aircraft is small, slow, made largely of composite and plywood, and flies low enough to disappear into ground clutter. Radar helps. Thermal sights help. But...
Share this story A Royal Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter was photographing a Russian frigate over the Baltic on Monday evening when the frigate fired two flares at it. One passed close to the aircraft. Nobody was hurt and the helicopter was undamaged. It was flying...
Share this story The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has the 1903 Wright Flyer. It has the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module, a Concorde, a Space Shuttle and an SR-71 Blackbird. What it has never had, in all the years since the...
Share this story Three numbers changed on Monday morning, and one name. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in National Harbor, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the service now intends to have at least 500 Collaborative...
Share this story For decades the American position on weapons in orbit was a careful non-answer. Officials talked about resilience, about protecting assets, about counter-space capability in the abstract. Nobody said the United States had put weapons up there. On...
Share this story The United States bought 337 MQ-9 Reapers over the nineteen-year life of the programme. After the fighting with Iran, the Air Force has roughly 135 left, against a floor it says should be 189. That is the arithmetic behind everything that happened on...
Share this story Every satellite navigation signal that reaches the Earth’s surface arrives weaker than the background noise of the universe. A GPS satellite transmits from 20,000 kilometres up on roughly the power of a car headlight. By the time that signal...
Share this story The model on the show floor at National Harbor is 34 feet long and you can walk all the way around it. There is no cockpit, no canopy, no windscreen, nothing for a human head to sit behind. What there is, on top of the fuselage where an intake has no...
Share this story A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps,...
Share this story When the backseater known as Dude 44 Bravo broke his silence on 60 Minutes, most of the coverage went to what he said. The more durable part of the broadcast was what it showed. Alongside the interview, CBS aired video of both rescues that had not...
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