The Last Aircraft Curtiss-Wright Ever Built
The name Curtiss-Wright carried a century of aviation in it — the fusion of Glenn Curtiss’s company with the firm founded by the Wright brothers themselves. For decades it built engines, propellers and aircraft that helped win two world wars. And then, in...
The Jet With Giant Fans Hidden in Its Wings
Most vertical-takeoff jets of the 1960s did the obvious thing: point the engine nozzles down and blast the aircraft off the ground. Ryan’s XV-5 Vertifan did something far stranger. It hid two enormous fans inside its wings, spun them with its own jet exhaust,...
The Giant That Flew Before the Fighters
In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It was called the...
The Bomb Steered by Live Pigeons
In the middle of the Second World War, one of the most famous psychologists in America proposed a guidance system for bombs that used no radar, no gyroscopes, and no vacuum tubes. It used pigeons. Live ones. Riding inside the nose of the bomb.The astonishing part is...
The US Plan to Firebomb Japan With Bats
In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should have gone...
The Spitfires That Flew a Red Star Into Battle
Look closely at the tail of the Spitfire and something is wrong — gloriously, deliberately wrong. Beside the familiar red-white-blue fin flash of the Royal Air Force sits a five-pointed communist red star. This is a British fighter, in British service, flying...
Airbus Keeps Its Lead Over Boeing
July was, by Airbus’s recent standards, a quiet month. The European planemaker handed over 67 aircraft to 39 customers — a step down from 89 in June and 81 in May. And yet, halfway-plus through 2026, Airbus is still comfortably in front.The running total...
Poland’s MiG-29s Are Going to Ukraine After All
For months the story ran the wrong way. Poland was going to scrap its last MiG-29 fighters rather than hand them to Ukraine, a drones-for-jets deal apparently dead in the water. On 7 August 2026 the narrative flipped.Ukraine’s Ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar,...
France Puts 114 Rafales on India’s Table
France has made its move. On 6 August 2026, Dassault Aviation handed New Delhi a formal techno-commercial proposal for 114 Rafale fighters — the long-awaited answer to India’s Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) tender, and one of the largest single fighter...
The Race for the Bomb: A Focus Series
An Afterburner focus series in ten parts, inspired by Richard Rhodes’ masterpiece The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It is the biggest story of the twentieth century, and it is also, from start to finish, an aviation story. It begins with a refugee physicist at a...
Recent Comments