Military Aviation, News
The fighter jets rolling onto the runway at NAS Fallon in Nevada are not U.S. Navy aircraft. They are operated by TacAir — a private company based in Reno. The pilots in the cockpits are civilians, many of them former military. Their job is to fly aggressively against...
Military Aviation, News
It came home to Portsmouth on October 11, 2025, callsign TABOR61, nose adorned with two small silhouettes of Shahed-type drones alongside the figure of Ares. The Idaho Air National Guard A-10C had just finished six months in the CENTCOM area of responsibility. It had...
News
On March 3, 2026, an Iranian ballistic missile got through the air defenses surrounding Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. No one was killed. But the message was impossible to ignore: the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East — home to the air operations...
News
For thirty years, Prince Sultan Air Base has been the quiet backbone of U.S. air power in the Gulf — a vast installation in the Saudi desert, three hours’ drive from Riyadh, that has hosted American forces through Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and every crisis in...
News
The U.S. military has fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iran in four weeks of war. That number — buried in a Military Times report on March 27 — has set off alarm bells inside the Pentagon. Not because the campaign isn’t working. But because of...
Military Aviation, News
Photographers watching the B-2 Spirits taxi out for another Iran mission on March 25 noticed something odd. Rows of white rectangular patches — uniformly sized, black-bordered — running along the leading edges of both wings. On two separate aircraft. Nobody at the Air...
History & Legends
Most aircraft are designed to fly straight and level by default. Take your hands off the controls and they glide on, stable, content, reassuring. The F-16 Fighting Falcon is not like most aircraft. Take your hands off the controls in an F-16 and it will try to kill...
History & Legends
January 2, 1967. Colonel Robin Olds — World War II ace, Vietnam War wing commander, and possibly the most dangerous man ever to strap into a fighter jet — had a problem. North Vietnam’s MiG-21s were shooting down American aircraft with near impunity. The rules...
History & Legends
Franz Stigler had one kill to go. One more aircraft, and he would earn the Knight’s Cross — the highest military honour the Luftwaffe could bestow. He had fought across North Africa and was now flying Bf 109s over Germany, defending the Reich from the waves of...
History & Legends
In the summer of 1951, American F-86A pilots over North Korea were dying. Not because the MiG-15 was faster. Not because the North Korean and Chinese pilots were better. They were dying because at around Mach 0.86 — the speed at which the Sabre’s tail control...
History & Legends
Thirteen miles above Southern California, moving at roughly a mile every two seconds, Major Brian Shul and his backseat reconnaissance officer Walt were monitoring Los Angeles Center radio traffic when the entertainment started. A Cessna pilot had asked for a ground...
Military Aviation, News
In U.S. defence procurement, hitting your cost target is newsworthy. Beating it significantly is almost unheard of. Yet that is exactly what Air Force officials are claiming about the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme — the effort to build autonomous drone...
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