The Glider-Like Spy Drone the USAF Is Sending to Replace the Reaper
It looks like a motor glider. It practically is a motor glider. The DZYNE Technologies ULTRA — the Unmanned Long-endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft — has long sailplane wings, a single turbocharged piston engine, no pilot, and the kind of slender white...
Battle-Damaged KC-135 Tankers Are Limping Home Through Mildenhall
Plane spotters at RAF Mildenhall pulled out their long lenses last week and got a picture nobody at Air Mobility Command was hoping to see twice. A US Air Force KC-135R Stratotanker, peppered with what aviation analysts identified as shrapnel impacts down the fuselage...
Two Pilots Eject as Navy T-45 Goshawk Crashes in Mississippi
Two Martin-Baker ejection seats fired into a Mississippi sky on the afternoon of 26 May 2026. The T-45C Goshawk they had just left came down on private farmland in Noxubee County, Mississippi, near Naval Air Station Meridian. Both crew members ejected safely and were...
USAF Builds a ‘Speedline’ to Upgrade F-15E Strike Eagles for the Next War
The phrase the Air Force uses is “speedline.” It is the polite way to say: this is taking too long, we are going to do it differently, in one building, faster than the regular depot pipeline can manage. On 26 May 2026, the service stood one up at Warner...
F-35 Just Took Command of a Stealth Combat Drone in Flight
The F-35 pilot never left the ground. He sat in a parked cockpit, tablet in hand, while a General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger turned racetracks in the sky overhead. The connection between them was not a fibre cable, not a microwave dish, not even a direct datalink. It was a...
Caught on Camera: A Chinese Tanker Refueled Two Fighters Inside Taiwan’s ADIZ
The infrared image is grainy. Two delta-winged shapes flank a much larger silhouette, and a thin line connects them — a refueling hose, suspended somewhere over the East China Sea. It is May 25, 2026, and a Republic of China Air Force F-16 has just locked its Sniper...
The Soviet Bomber Test Pilots Called “The Chicken”
If you had asked a Soviet test pilot in 1940 to name the strangest aeroplane he had ever been ordered to fly, there is an excellent chance the answer would have come back as four syllables: Дэ-Бэ Эл-Ка. The Belyayev DB-LK. Two fuselages, no central cockpit,...
The B-29’s Pressurised Crawl Tunnel: 1940s Engineering Genius
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was the most expensive single weapons programme of the Second World War. It cost more than the Manhattan Project. Its development consumed three billion dollars of 1944 money — call it sixty billion today — and produced an aircraft that...
Australia Opens Southern Hemisphere’s First P-8A Poseidon Deep Maintenance Facility
Australia has opened the Southern Hemisphere’s first deep maintenance facility for the Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, marking a significant expansion of the nation’s self-reliance in sustaining one of the Western world’s most...
South Korea Bets Big on Building Its Own Jet Engine
South Korea builds its own fighter jets. It builds its own tanks, its own artillery, its own warships. But it does not build its own jet engines. Every KF-21 Boramae that rolls off the line in Sacheon is powered by an American General Electric F414 — the same turbofan...
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