Share this story You have just finished your drink, the seat backs are coming up and suddenly the cabin goes dark. No, the airline is not trying to set a romantic mood or save electricity. When crews dim the cabin lights for takeoff and landing, they are preparing...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Share this story On 14 September 1939, two weeks after war broke out in Europe, a 50-year-old engineer in a business suit and a felt hat climbed into an open frame of steel tubes in Stratford, Connecticut. Ropes tied the machine to the ground. When Igor Sikorsky...
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Share this story Fly from New York to London overnight and you land at breakfast time feeling as if someone has stolen a night of your life. Fly back and you arrive tired, but somehow it is easier to shake off. That is not your imagination, and it is not just the...
Share this story A heat-seeking missile chases something it can feel: the hot exhaust of an engine. A radar-guided missile chases something it cannot see at all until a radar wave bounces off it. That difference is why radar missiles can kill from beyond visual range,...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, C.R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, picked up the telephone and would not put it down. On the other end was Donald Douglas, who had a perfectly good airliner, the DC-2, and no particular wish to build another. Smith...
Share this story The most successful pilot ever to fly the F-14 Tomcat never went to TOPGUN, never landed on a carrier and never fought for the U.S. Navy. He flew for Iran, against Iraq, in a war most Western readers barely remember.Jalil Zandi is credited with 11...
Share this story On the day Michael Wynne reported for active duty in August 1966, the news came through that his older brother had been shot down over Vietnam. Forty-two years later, the younger Wynne would leave the Air Force for the last time, as its civilian head,...
Share this story Romania has lost one airline to the courts this month already. On Thursday, 22 October 2026, a second one walked into the courthouse, this time insisting it would walk out again.Dan Air, the Bucharest-based carrier that flies a small fleet of Airbus...
Share this story On a normal Friday, Taiwan’s airports are among the busiest in East Asia. On Friday, 23 October 2026, most of the island simply stopped, and the flights stopped with it.Typhoon Champi, at one point a super typhoon and one of the strongest storms...
Share this story A carrier fighter is only as good as the deck it lands on, and India has bought a fighter designed for somebody else’s deck. Now the Indian Navy has started finding out exactly what that means.Defence sources told the news agency ANI, as...
Share this story Iran built Eagle 44 so that its warplanes could ride out an air war inside a mountain. In 2026, the mountain got its test. Now satellite images suggest the diggers never really stopped.Imagery taken by Planet Labs on 29 September 2026 and published by...
Share this story Some days the hardest part of flight training is the landing. On Thursday evening, 22 October 2026, two U.S. Air Force pilots in a T-6A Texan II decided, with expert advice from the ground, that the safest way to finish their flight was not to land at...
Share this story Counting aircraft from orbit is a strange way to follow a weapons programme, but with China it is often the only way. On 5 October 2026 a commercial satellite passed over Xi’an-Yanliang airfield in Shaanxi province and photographed four KJ-3000...
Share this story Bombers are supposed to be the ones being hunted. The U.S. Air Force is now asking, in writing, whether they could do some of the hunting.The service’s long-term fighter force structure report, sent to Congress last week and first reported by...
Share this story For twenty years the F-35 has been bought the way most people buy groceries: one lot at a time, haggling at the checkout. On Thursday, 22 October 2026, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced they want to switch to a subscription.The two sides...