New ‘Bridge’ Air Force One Finishes Testing, Summer Debut
Somewhere in Waco, Texas, a Boeing 747 that used to carry Qatari royalty is being dressed up in red, white, and blue. By this summer, it’ll be calling itself Air Force One. The Air Force announced on May 1 that the “Bridge” VC-25B has completed its...
T-7A Red Hawk Cleared for Production at Last
It took a fixed-price contract, $1.8 billion in losses, two years of schedule slippage, a software fix for the fly-by-wire system, a redesigned ejection seat sequence, and more than a few tense program reviews — but Boeing’s T-7A Red Hawk is finally going to be...
Super Hornets Drop Bombs Down Iranian Tanker Smokestacks
A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet just did something that sounds like it belongs in a video game — and the Pentagon released video to prove it. On May 8, 2026, a Super Hornet from USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) dropped precision-guided munitions straight down the...
After 70 Years, the USAF Is Finally Looking for a B-52 Replacement
The U.S. Air Force has officially launched the paperwork to start looking for something — anything — to replace the B-52 Stratofortress. The BUFF has been flying since 1952, and the Air Force’s plan is apparently to keep flying it until the airframes are old...
The F7U Cutlass: The Jet That Killed Its Pilots
Imagine a fighter that destroyed roughly a quarter of its entire production run in accidents. A fighter whose engines were so feeble that pilots joked they put out less heat than Westinghouse’s toasters. A fighter so universally hated that naval aviators gave it...
Lakenheath F-15E Wears 1986 Libya-Raid Camo
The F-15E Strike Eagle has worn the same paint scheme since 1988. Three shades of grey, low-visibility national insignia, and the squadron’s tail flash. It looks the way fighter jets are supposed to look — neutral, businesslike, slightly bored. This week, that...
Air Force Cuts BACN, Bets Everything on Starshield
For 18 years, somewhere over Afghanistan, Iraq, or — more recently — the Black Sea, an unremarkable-looking Bombardier business jet has been flying loops at 45,000 feet doing the most important job in modern American air combat: making everyone talk to everyone. The...
ARRW Rises From the Dead — USAF Revives Its Mach-20 Missile
The AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon was supposed to be America’s first operational air-launched hypersonic missile. It was effectively killed in March 2023 — after three failed booster tests in 2021 and a failed all-up round test that month — when...
Argentina Buys KC-135s — Vipers Now Reach the Falklands
Argentina has not had real combat air power since 1982. Forty-four years after the Falklands, the country flew its last operational Mirage in 2015 and has been making do with subsonic A-4 Skyhawks and IA-63 Pampa trainers ever since. That is finally over: the F-16...
China is Turning 1958 MiGs Into Suicide Drones
The Shenyang J-6 first flew in 1958. It was a Soviet-designed swept-wing day-fighter that hit Mach 1.45 if you held your nose right and didn’t mind a combat radius of about 700 kilometres. The Chinese kept building it until 1981, retired the last from front-line...
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