Share this story By 1944 the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was already one of the biggest, heaviest single-engine fighters of the war — a seven-ton brute that pilots adored. Then Republic asked a wild question: what if we made it even bigger, and bolted on the most...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked American industry a genuinely strange question: could a fighter take off straight up, standing on its tail, from a platform on the back of a warship? Lockheed’s answer was a stubby little aircraft that...
Share this story Long before the Predator, before the Reaper, before a single Hellfire was ever fired from an unmanned aircraft, a little jet-powered drone with a bug’s name was already flying spy missions over the most heavily defended airspace on Earth. It was...
Share this story In the first days of October 1973, Israel was losing. Egyptian and Syrian armies had struck on Yom Kippur, and Israeli tanks and aircraft were being destroyed faster than the country could replace them. Then, out of the western sky, came the sound of...
Share this story It is white, it is enormous, and it is faster than almost anything with a bomb bay. Russian crews call the Tupolev Tu-160 the “White Swan” for its pale anti-flash paint and its improbably graceful lines. The rest of the world knows it by...
Share this story Somewhere over the Nevada desert on a July morning in 1957, five American officers stood in the open, looked straight up, and waited for a nuclear weapon to go off directly above their heads. There was no bunker. There was no lead shielding. There was...
Share this story A Marine fighter squadron that flew its last Hornet into retirement in 2023 is coming back — and this time it is coming back for the carrier deck.On 31 July 2026, Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 115, the “Silver Eagles,” flew the...
Share this story Somewhere under the granite of Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, a squadron of fighter jets rolled into a cave and the blast doors closed behind them. This was not a movie set. It was this week’s headline act of Han Kuang 42, the...
Share this story It is the kind of thing a weekend pilot never expects to see filling the windscreen: the grey nose of an F-16 Fighting Falcon sliding into formation a few wingspans away, wings heavy with missiles. On Sunday, at least one general-aviation pilot over...
Share this story Three de Havilland DH.108 Swallows were ever built. Each one, in turn, killed the man flying it. That is not a curse or a legend — it is simply the record of one of the most beautiful and lethal experimental aircraft Britain ever put into the...
Share this story Shooting down a ballistic missile with a laser sounds like science fiction. For a brief period around 2010, it was an American aircraft parked on a runway in California. The Boeing YAL-1 was a 747 with a megawatt-class laser built into its fuselage...
Share this story On 27 June 1969, a North American B-25 Mitchell lifted off from Fairbanks, Alaska, lost an engine moments later, and came down wheels-up on a sandbar in the middle of the Tanana River. Everyone walked away. The bomber did not. Recovering it would have...
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