Code 7500: Bulgaria’s MiG-29 Scrambles
At 1:54pm on June 30, a Bulgarian MiG-29 lit its afterburners and clawed off the runway at Graf Ignatievo. Three minutes later it had formed up on the wing of a civilian Airbus A320 that had just transmitted the four digits every air-defence controller dreads:...
Trump’s Qatari Air Force One Finally Flies
Somewhere over the Great Plains on Wednesday, a 14-year-old Boeing 747 that nobody could sell will become the most politically radioactive aircraft in American skies. President Donald Trump is taking his first flight aboard the Qatari-gifted Air Force One — and...
China’s Tailless Fighter Just Showed It Can Turn
One question has shadowed China’s J-36 since it first flew: a tailless aircraft can be stealthy and stable, but can it actually manoeuvre? New footage circulating online appears to answer it. The big, three-engined sixth-generation prototype is seen pulling a...
A Chinese Missile May Have Downed a US Jet
When an American F-15E Strike Eagle went down over Iran this spring, the obvious question was what shot it. A new answer is now circulating in Washington — and it points east, to China. According to NBC News, citing sources familiar with the investigation, U.S....
The Most Expensive Aircraft That Never Made It
Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune, without ever doing the...
The Fighter With No Guns Up Front
Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second crewman. This...
Four Hercules, 2,500 Miles, Ninety Minutes
It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers — a fake...
The Paper Balloons Japan Floated to America
It is the morning of 5 May 1945, on the wooded slopes of Gearhart Mountain in southern Oregon. The Reverend Archie Mitchell has driven his pregnant wife, Elsie, and five children from his Sunday school up for a picnic. As Archie parks the car, the others walk ahead...
The $13 Billion Helicopter That Never Flew a President
There is expensive, and then there is “costs more than Air Force One.” The VH-71 Kestrel, the helicopter that was supposed to become the next Marine One, somehow managed the second one. By the time anyone added it all up, the bill for 28 of them had passed...
The Fighter That Flew as Both Prop and Jet
Most fighters carry the engine in the nose and the propeller out front. The Swedish Saab 21 did the opposite: it put the engine behind the pilot and the propeller at the very back, spinning between two slender tail booms. It was an elegant answer to an old problem...
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