Share this story On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon...
Share this story Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January...
Share this story The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes...
Share this story In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews...
Share this story There is a category of military aircraft that never fires a shot and decides the battle anyway. The Beriev A-50 is one of them: an Ilyushin Il-76 transport with a nine-metre radar dish bolted on top, fifteen people inside, and the ability to see six...
Share this story A Russian jet-powered drone struck the engine of a train at Yahodyn on Monday morning, about two kilometres from the Polish border. Nobody was killed. The passengers had been ordered off fifteen minutes earlier, which is now a routine Ukrainian...
Share this story The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to...
Share this story The people of the Haslital have been asking a reasonable question since 2022: what will an F-35 actually sound like when it takes off from the valley they live in? The Swiss Air Force and armasuisse agreed to answer it the sensible way, by flying an...
Share this story Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales....
Share this story Russia stopped building the Tupolev Tu-95 in 1992 and scrapped the tooling three years later. That single fact is what makes the satellite imagery coming out of Engels-2 worth paying attention to. On the night of Friday 28 August, Ukraine’s SBU struck...
Share this story Air Force basic training now includes a task that would have been unthinkable for a recruit ten years ago: walk up to a fighter, hang a missile on it, and do it as a team you organised yourself. The Air Base Training Range at Joint Base San...
Share this story Air Force Global Strike Command has published a progress report on its effort to fix bomber readiness, and it contains one conspicuous absence: any mission capable rate. The North Star Readiness Campaign began in the summer of 2025 and reached its...
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