The Record No Carrier Wanted to Break
Somewhere in the northern Arabian Sea, a 100,000-ton nuclear-powered supercarrier is doing something no American warship has done in the modern era: it simply will not stop. The USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego before Christmas, touched a pier exactly once, and has...
Ten Battered Raptors Come Home From Iran
Just after first light on July 10, ten F-22 Raptors dropped out of the English sky and rolled onto the runway at RAF Fairford under the callsign TREND. They looked like they had been to war. That is because they had. These were the 1st Fighter Wing’s jets from Joint...
The Eagle That Outlived Its Own Replacement
Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two...
The F-35’s Killer Upgrade Keeps Slipping
The F-35 you see on the flight line today is not the F-35 its makers keep promising. The one they keep promising — the one bristling with new sensors, electronic-warfare gear and more than a dozen additional weapons — lives inside a modernization program called Block...
The Air Force Goes Shopping for New Ways to Kill Drones
The aircraft that worries American air base commanders most in 2026 is not a Chinese stealth fighter or a Russian bomber. It is a battery-powered quadcopter that costs less than a used laptop, and there is nothing to stop a hostile one from buzzing the fence line of a...
Trump Ditches the New Air Force One, Flies the Old Jet Home
The most expensive gift in the history of aviation sat gleaming on the ramp in Turkey — and the President of the United States walked straight past it. On 8 July, barely a day after American bombs fell on Iran, Donald Trump boarded the old Air Force One, the...
The Raid That Flew at Fifty Feet
Before dawn on 1 August 1943, the desert around Benghazi coughed itself awake. One hundred and seventy-eight B-24 Liberators, engines scoured half to death by Libyan sand, staggered off the runways with 3,100 US gallons (11,700 litres) of fuel and full bomb bays. More...
Desert One: The Night Everything Went Wrong
At 22:47 on 24 April 1980, a blacked-out MC-130 thumped down on a salt flat 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Tehran, and the most secret mission in America promptly met the public. Headlights. A Mercedes bus, forty-plus Iranian civilians aboard, rolling straight...
T-7A Full-Rate Production Slips to 2029
Last week we walked you through the sustainment data fight simmering between Boeing and the Air Force over the T-7A Red Hawk. Seven days later, the Government Accountability Office showed up with receipts. GAO’s Weapon Systems Annual Assessment, released July 2...
Trump Dangles the F-35 in Ankara
Six years ago the United States took Turkey’s F-35s away. The jets Ankara had already paid for went into storage in the Arizona desert, Turkish pilots were sent home from Luke Air Force Base, and roughly 100 stealth fighters on order evaporated. On Tuesday,...
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