Share this story Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the...
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
Share this story At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed...
Share this story Two Californian companies announced this week that they are going to build an autonomous aircraft together. They did not say what it is, who it is for, what it costs, or when it flies. Ordinarily that would be a press release to ignore. This one is...
Share this story The video is short and, if you have any imagination at all, deeply unpleasant. A Mi-8 descends towards a public highway on Sakhalin Island, main rotor blades sweeping low over a truck that is still driving along the road. Then the helicopter goes off...
Share this story The Royal Air Force flies several aircraft that it cannot refuel. This is not a secret, and it is not new, but it is faintly absurd, and it has finally produced an answer. In a written answer on 2 September, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and...
Share this story Russia is taking its export fighter to the Egyptian coast next week, and it is bringing something it has never shown anyone. Rostec, the Russian state defence conglomerate, says the Su-57E will fly at the El Alamein International Airshow from 8 to 10...
Share this story Hypersonic weapons have a problem that has nothing to do with physics. They work. They are also so expensive that nobody can afford to fire very many of them, which in a serious war is the same thing as not having them. On 1 September the Air Force...
Share this story On 1 September, a formation of very old, very large aeroplanes settled onto a runway in the Northern Territory of Australia, 4,000 kilometres from the nearest American base and comfortably beyond the reach of most of China’s missile force. That was...
Share this story For years the standard defence of the F-35 went like this: yes, the development was a nightmare, but the unit price kept falling, and eventually a stealth fighter would cost about what a fourth-generation jet costs. That argument has now run out of...
Share this story Buying more of a good fighter sounds like an easy win. The Pentagon has just published the fine print, and it is a reminder that in defence procurement, doubling an order is never simply a matter of writing a bigger cheque. Earlier this year the U.S....
Share this story At about seven in the morning on 2 September, a grey four-engined Hercules bristling with antennas rolled down the runway at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona and climbed into the desert haze. Its callsign was VOLT01. Six hours later it came...
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