Red Over White, You’re Alright: How PAPI Works
There is a sentence every student pilot in the world learns by heart, usually while sweating through their first night approach: red over white, you’re alright. Say it out loud a few times. It rhymes, which is useful, because you are about to stake a 30-ton...
F/A-XX: The Navy’s Secret Sixth-Gen Fighter Moves
Everybody talks about the F-47. Every defence reporter, every think-tank panel, every congressional hearing. Boeing’s clean-sheet sixth-generation fighter for the Air Force gets the headlines and the money and the Trump tweets. Meanwhile, across the river at...
Navy’s T-45 Replacement Contest Goes Formal
Follow-up to our April 1 post, “Navy’s $10 Billion Trainer Race Begins.” Two weeks ago, the U.S. Navy’s hunt for a new jet trainer was a rumour with a price tag. This week it is a formal contest. NAVAIR issued the long-awaited Undergraduate Jet...
America Burned Through Every PRSM It Owned
The Precision Strike Missile was supposed to be the Army’s long-reach wonder weapon — a 500-kilometre knife that could punch through anything ATACMS couldn’t reach. On April 1, 2023, Lockheed Martin delivered the first production rounds. Three years later,...
Oh, the Humanity: 34 Seconds That Ended the Age of the Airship
At 7:25 PM on May 6, 1937, the German airship LZ 129 Hindenburg — 804 feet long, the largest aircraft ever built — caught fire while attempting to dock at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. In 34 seconds, the largest flying object in history was a wreck on the...
The Tiny Radio That Saved One Airman
The wounded officer sat in darkness on a rocky mountainside, bleeding from shrapnel wounds, surrounded by hostile terrain. His F-15E had gone down fourteen hours earlier in Iranian airspace. The search helicopters had cycled through their on-station time. The dark had...
Pentagon Lasers Cleared for U.S. Skies
On Friday, April 11, 2026, the FAA and Pentagon quietly shook hands on something unprecedented: a federal framework allowing the U.S. military to operate high-energy laser weapons against drones in civilian airspace without forcing emergency airport closures. It...
Air Guard to Congress: Buy 100 Fighters a Year
On April 13, 2026, Air National Guard leaders delivered a stark message to Congress: the U.S. Air Force is “the oldest, the smallest, and the least ready in its 78-year history.” To fix that, they say, America needs to buy 100 new fighters per year....
Minesweepers Race to Hormuz
In late April 2026, the U.S. Navy quietly initiated what may be the most consequential mine-clearing campaign since Operation Desert Storm. After weeks of escalating tensions and failed diplomacy with Iran, two Avenger-class minesweepers—USS Chief (MCM 1) and USS...
Squire: The Wing-In-Ground Drone Takes Off
The Navy’s been studying seagliders for littoral ops. The Air Force frets over contested zones. But on April 13, 2026, the Marines—historically the force that thinks different—just flew something that looks like a distant cousin of the Soviet Caspian Sea...
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