Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
Share this story At two minutes past noon on 21 February 1973, the co-pilot of a Libyan Boeing 727 told air traffic control in Cairo that he was ten miles out and ready to descend. He was a hundred and five miles away, in the wrong country, with two Israeli Phantoms...
Share this story Yesterday we covered the flight itself: an unmarked US Air Force C-17 that appeared over Moscow, sat at Vnukovo for about eight hours, and went home. You can read that here — The Moscow Mystery Jet Carried the CIA Director. The obvious question...
Share this story Somewhere over Egypt this week, a Chinese heavy fighter and a French-built Rafale turned hard against each other for the first time on record. Neither air force has said where, and neither has said who came off better — which has not stopped...
Share this story On 23 August, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said it had engaged 14 targets across southern Russia and occupied Crimea in a single day, and hit 11 of them. Among them, according to the unit’s commander, were two Russian combat aircraft...
Share this story In 1937 Focke-Wulf flew a fighter that was roughly 80 km/h faster than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 then in service, using exactly the same engines. It had twice the range. It weighed twice as much and still outran the thing it was compared against. Nine...
Share this story Put two engines in a fighter and you normally end up with something like a Bf 110: two nacelles, one on each wing, and an aeroplane that is bigger than the thing it is trying to shoot down. Kawasaki tried a different answer. They put one engine in...
Share this story In April 2026 the US Navy released a short note with an unusually literal headline: a CH-53K had lifted a CH-53K. One King Stallion picked up another King Stallion and flew away with it. Not a stripped hulk, not a mock-up. A helicopter carrying a...
Share this story Every helicopter pilot knows the problem with ejecting from a helicopter. Above your head, turning at several hundred revolutions per minute, are the blades. Fire yourself upwards and you go through them. Which is why, in more than a century of rotary...
Share this story Updated 25 August 2026The mystery is solved. The aircraft carried CIA Director John Ratcliffe on an unannounced trip to Moscow, according to reporting by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CBS News and Axios, all citing...
Share this story On the night of 21 September 1993, a decorated Soviet combat pilot climbed onto the podium of the Russian parliament and, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, swore himself in as President of Russia. Five years earlier, the same man had been hanging...
Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
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