Share this story The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured...
Share this story Here’s something the U.S. Navy doesn’t put in the recruitment brochures: the hardest thing a naval aviator will ever do isn’t dogfighting, or dodging surface-to-air missiles, or threading a low-level attack run through a mountain...
Share this story Every fighter pilot trains for it. Most pray they’ll never experience it. The moment a jet engine — the machine that keeps you flying at 500 knots and 30,000 feet — stops working. Whether it’s a compressor stall that sounds like a cannon...
Share this story The Grumman A-6 Intruder was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. What it could do was find a target in zero visibility — in monsoon rain, in fog, at night, in conditions that grounded every other aircraft on the carrier deck — and put...
Share this story The English Electric Lightning was not a sensible aircraft. It burned fuel at a rate that gave ground crews anxiety attacks. It had two Rolls-Royce Avon engines stacked vertically — one on top of the other — inside a fuselage so slim that the only...
Share this story The U.S. Navy’s next carrier-based fighter just dodged a bullet. After the Pentagon attempted to gut the F/A-XX program in favor of the Air Force’s F-47, Congress has intervened with force — inserting $897.3 million into the FY2026 defense...
Share this story A decade after Boeing shuttered the C-17 Globemaster III production line in Long Beach, California, the unthinkable is back on the table. Boeing says it is “encouraged” by restart discussions with multiple operators, and the House Armed...
Share this story Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if...
Share this story In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a...
Share this story The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no...
Share this story China appears to be flight-testing not one but two sixth-generation fighters at once — and the lesser-known of the pair just resurfaced in fresh 2026 imagery. New footage and images circulating from facilities linked to Shenyang Aircraft...
Share this story Turkey wants its fifth-generation fighter to fly to war with a robot wingman on each shoulder. At the World Defense Show 2026, Turkish Aerospace Industries unveiled a manned-unmanned teaming concept that pairs the KAAN fighter with two Anka III...
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