Why Fighter Jets Dump Fuel Before Landing
You have seen the photographs: a fighter jet trailing twin streams of white mist from its wingtips, the spray catching sunlight like a veil behind the aircraft. It looks dramatic, wasteful, and slightly insane. Why would anyone dump thousands of litres of jet fuel...
Spitfire Turns 90: Rarest Variant Flies at Wanaka
On the afternoon of March 5, 1936, Captain Joseph “Mutt” Summers climbed into the cockpit of a prototype designated K5054 at Eastleigh Aerodrome near Southampton. Eight minutes later, he landed, climbed out, and reportedly said: “Don’t touch...
The Five Most Dangerous Minutes of Every Flight
The flight is one hour long. For 55 minutes of it, practically nothing bad can happen. The aircraft is at cruise altitude, the autopilot is engaged, and the most dangerous object in the cockpit is probably the coffee. But the first two and a half minutes after takeoff...
Your First Spin: Why Flight Schools Stopped Teaching Them
The nose pitches up. The stall horn screams. You stomp full rudder and the world rotates — the horizon spins past the windscreen once, twice, three times, faster than you expected, the ground corkscrewing toward you in a way that your brain insists cannot possibly be...
Iraq Reopens Airspace After 40 Days of War
For forty days, Iraq’s skies were empty. No airliners climbed out of Baghdad. No cargo flights departed Basra. No pilgrims flew into Najaf. The entire country’s airspace — closed since February 28, when the first American and Israeli strikes hit Iran —...
Space Force Budget Doubles to $71 Billion
The United States Space Force is six years old, has fewer personnel than the New York City Police Department, and just asked Congress for $71 billion. If approved, the 2027 budget request would nearly double the service’s funding in a single year — the most...
Anduril Secretly Building Hypersonic Missiles and Drones
Palmer Luckey sold virtual reality headsets to Facebook for two billion dollars, then used the proceeds to build a defence company that makes autonomous weapons. Now that company — Anduril Industries — is quietly hiring engineers to design missiles that fly faster...
Jolly Green Gets Missile Shield After Iran Rescue
The HH-60W Jolly Green II flew into Iran on April 2 to rescue the crew of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle. It found the pilot, pulled him aboard, and took hits from small arms fire on the way out — wounding crew members but staying airborne. The helicopter did everything...
Belgium Picks SkyCourier as Its First Special-Ops Plane
Belgium has an unconventional taste in special operations aircraft. While most NATO allies shop for modified business jets or purpose-built gunships, Brussels just placed an order for five Cessna 408 SkyCouriers — a twin-turboprop designed to haul FedEx packages. It...
Chile’s KC-135 Refuels F-35s in a Latin American First
At 26,000 feet over the Pacific, a Chilean Air Force KC-135E extended its boom toward a pair of American fighters that no South American nation has ever operated. Two F-35A Lightning IIs from the 388th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, locked on, took fuel,...
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