A-10 Warthogs Help Find Missing Boater on Florida’s Lake Arbuckle
Share this story The A-10 Thunderbolt II was built to find tanks, not boaters. But in late April 2026, two Warthogs training over central Florida turned their night vision goggles and targeting pods on Lake Arbuckle and helped deputies find a 73-year-old man who had...
Swept Wings Explained: How Sweep Pushed Jets Toward Mach 1
Share this story In the autumn of 1935, some of the greatest aerodynamicists alive gathered in Rome for the Volta Congress, an international meeting on “High Velocities in Aviation”. Ludwig Prandtl was there, and Theodore von Kármán, and G....
SR-71 at Mach 4: What It Would Take to Make the Blackbird Faster
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Horten Ho 229: The Jet Flying Wing That Was Never a Stealth Fighter
Share this story It has no fuselage, no fin and no tailplane, and it looks like something from the 1980s rather than 1945. The Horten Ho 229 is one of the most photographed German aircraft of the Second World War, and it is usually described as the world’s first...
Boeing Wins F/A-XX: The Navy’s Sixth-Generation Fighter Goes to St. Louis
Share this story The US Navy has picked Boeing to build its next carrier fighter. On Tuesday 29 September 2026, the Pentagon announced that Boeing had won the F/A-XX competition against Northrop Grumman, with a full-scale development contract valued at more than $20...
Visual Identification: Why Fighter Pilots Needed Eyes on the Target
Share this story Modern fighters carry missiles that can hit a target they will never see. Radar finds it, a data link tracks it, and a missile covers the last 50 or 100 kilometres on its own. Yet for most of the jet age, one of the most important rules in air combat...
Ukraine Ordered 590,000 Drones in 2026, and Interceptors Top the List
Share this story In the first nine months of 2026, Ukrainian military units ordered more than 590,000 drones through a single online marketplace. The number alone is remarkable. What they chose to buy is more telling: the most ordered category is no longer the FPV...
B-2 and U-2 Crews: How You Eat, Drink and Go on a 44-Hour Sortie
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Beartrap: The Canadian Invention That Put Sea Kings on Destroyers
Share this story The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Navigators and Flight Engineers: How Cockpits Went From Five to Two
Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
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