History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell into the sea,...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
There is a place in the sky where flying too slow will kill you and flying too fast will kill you — and the gap between the two can be narrower than the length of a bus. Pilots call it the coffin corner, and it is one of the strangest, most unforgiving pieces of...
Aviation World, Military Aviation, News
The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a field watching very...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
From the air it looks like a filing system for aeroplanes. Row upon row of them, wingtip to wingtip, laid out across ten square kilometres of Arizona desert in lines so straight they look drawn. Bombers here. Fighters there. Transports over there. Around four thousand...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Earlier this year the RAF’s first E-7 Wedgetail spent a period at a Wiltshire airfield most people have never heard of, having its systems activated and its radar calibrated, before it was allowed anywhere near an operational squadron. That is not unusual....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Every bomb ever built before 1944 was designed to hit the thing it was aimed at. Barnes Wallis built two that were designed to land next to it. This was not a compromise or an admission that bombing was inaccurate. It was the entire principle. Wallis had worked out...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Everything a combat pilot knows about dropping a bomb assumes air. Thick air, at sensible altitudes, where wings generate predictable lift, engines produce rated thrust, and a weapon released at a known speed follows a known arc to the ground. In May 1999 the Indian...
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