An Embraer 170 flew from Puget Sound to southern Alaska and back, four hours and twenty-three minutes, with GPS switched off the whole way. It navigated by reading the magnetic field of the rocks underneath it. This is being reported in several places as the US Air...
Just after midnight on Pakistan Air Force Day, the PAF posted a patriotic music video called Fizaon K Pasbaan — Guardians of the Skies. Around twenty-eight seconds in, a six-wheeled air-defence vehicle with a large rectangular radar array rolls past. Pakistan...
Denmark has quietly finished buying sixteen more F-35As, taking its fleet from twenty-seven to forty-three. Nobody announced it. It surfaced in a Pentagon accounting document. The Danish government and the F-35 Joint Program Office closed the deal by 21 April 2026....
The thing hanging under the F-15 was not a bomb. It was a two-stage rocket seventeen feet ten inches long, and inside its nose sat an object the size of a large coffee can that weighed thirty pounds, carried no explosive of any kind, and had no engine capable of...
Switzerland voted for its new fighter jets in 2020 by 8,670 votes. It signed for 36 of them in 2022 at a price it believed was fixed. In August 2025 the Americans explained that the price had never been fixed. In March 2026 the Federal Council gave up on 36 and said...
A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock. His right wing root...
On a Tuesday evening in September 1909, in the hills behind Piedmont, California, a Chinese machinist took off in a biplane he had designed, built and powered with an engine he had also built, and flew an elliptical circuit around a hilltop for about twenty minutes...
She had held a pilot’s licence for thirteen months and had forty hours of flying in her logbook, total. The aeroplane was a wood-and-fabric trainer with an eighty-horsepower rotary engine and a service ceiling of about 4,300 metres. Aconcagua, off to her right,...
In 1969 the Chinese air force asked for a fighter small enough to be carried on the back of a truck. The idea was that in a war on Chinese soil, airfields would be bombed flat within days. What survived would be whatever could be hidden, dispersed and flown off short...
On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast off, came...
Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets. Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets behind their seats....
In 1965 the Republic of China Air Force built two graves at the Bitan military cemetery outside Taipei. One was for Major Yeh Changti, the other for Major Chang Liyi. Both men had been shot down over communist China. Both had been declared dead. The Central Daily News...
On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished. Seventeen men had been on board. A week later,...
On 4 December 1956, an Italian test pilot pointed a small silver aeroplane downhill from above 40,000 feet and became the first man to take an Italian-designed, Italian-built aircraft through the sound barrier. The aircraft was the Aerfer Sagittario 2. Two were built....
On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as two. They were not...
Stuart Anderson MP asked a dull question in July and got a dull answer in September. Buried in it is the clearest picture anyone has yet published of where Britain’s next fighter is actually being built — and a small arithmetic problem. The Future Combat...
Last week a volunteer-run space programme in Rancho Cordova, California, released some pictures. They show a dark, wing-shaped vehicle called Hazel dropping away from twin balloons joined by a long truss, high above the Earth. They are stills from an animation. There...