Inside the Geran-4: RFE/RL Tears Down Russia’s Jet Shahed
Share this story Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has taken a Russian Geran-4 apart on camera, and what spills out of the airframe is less a Russian weapon than a catalogue of global supply chains. The jet-powered successor to the Shahed carries around 55 foreign-made...
Carrier-Capable Aircraft: Why the F-22 Can’t, and a C-130 Did
Share this story On 30 October 1963 the crew of USS Forrestal watched a four-engined transport with a 132-foot wingspan come down their deck. It had no tailhook. It had no catapult attachment. The ship’s island cleared its wingtip by about fifteen feet. It...
F-117 Nighthawk: Retired in 2008, Still Flying in 2026
Share this story In December 2025 a photographer in the California desert filmed two black diamonds coming through a low-level route at a few hundred feet. In 2026 another one caught them again. The aircraft were F-117 Nighthawks, and the United States Air Force...
Pilot Retirement Age by Country: China Stops at 63, Japan at 67
Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Why Nothing Can Replace the Antonov An-124
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
Shark Mouth Nose Art: Who Painted It First, and Why It Stuck
Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Bréguet Br.960 Vultur: The French Jet That Also Carried a Propeller
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Sukhoi Su-17 (1949): The Fighter Whose Nose Ejected
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
ICAO Warns 193 States: Airliners Are Being Targeted Again
Share this story A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the...
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