How the Next-Gen Airlifter Will Land on Dirt Roads
A C-130J Super Hercules at a forward operating location. The Hercules has served as the backbone of tactical airlift for seven decades, but the Air Force is now planning its eventual replacement. (U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons) Somewhere in the western Pacific,...
China’s PL-16: The Stealth Missile That Could Outshoot America Over the Pacific
Somewhere in China’s vast defence-industrial complex, a missile is being built that could fundamentally change the arithmetic of air combat over the Pacific. The PL-16 — Beijing’s next-generation beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile — has never been...
The F-104 Starfighter: How Germany Turned a Masterpiece Into the Widowmaker
Kelly Johnson built the F-104 Starfighter to do one thing: climb fast, fly high, and kill Soviet bombers before they reached American cities. The Lockheed engineer surveyed Korean War fighter pilots in 1951 and concluded that what they wanted was not another heavy,...
India Unveils Its First AI-Piloted Fighter Concept
A Bengaluru startup has just thrown India’s hat into the ring of autonomous combat aviation. Flying Wedge Defence & Aerospace (FWDA) has unveiled the FWD Supreme — an AI-piloted fighter concept designed to fly, fight, and make tactical decisions without a...
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...
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...
The Mach 3 Interceptor With No Windscreen
The Republic XF-103 was meant to do something no fighter of the early 1950s could: cruise at Mach 3 — three times the speed of sound — at the edge of the stratosphere, run down a Soviet bomber, and kill it with missiles. To get there, its designers made a...
The People’s Fighter: Heinkel’s He 162 Volksjäger Was Built in 72 Days to Be Flown by Children
In September 1944, with Allied bombers reducing German cities to rubble and the Luftwaffe haemorrhaging experienced pilots at an unsustainable rate, the Reich Air Ministry issued one of the most desperate specifications in aviation history: design a jet fighter that...
The Soviet Airliner That Flew on Hydrogen — In 1988
On 15 April 1988, a modified Tupolev Tu-154 airliner took off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airfield with one of its three engines running on liquid hydrogen. It climbed to altitude, flew a circuit, and landed without incident. The aircraft was designated Tu-155, and...
The Air Force Wants a 1,000-Mile Missile — and It Changes Everything
The United States Air Force has quietly dropped one of the most ambitious weapons requirements in recent memory: a new air-to-air missile capable of killing targets at a minimum distance of 1,000 nautical miles — roughly 1,150 statute miles. That is approximately ten...
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