Britain’s New Spy Drone and Its Secret Pod
Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of its newest drone...
The Hypersonic Missile Built to Be Cheap
Here is America’s hypersonic problem in one sentence: the missiles work, but the factory doesn’t. The United States has spent years and billions proving it can build weapons that scream through the sky at more than five times the speed of sound. What it...
A Submarine-Hunting Eurodrone, Built for Japan
Hunting a modern submarine is one of the most demanding tasks in military aviation. It means hours of patient, fuel-hungry orbits over empty ocean, listening for a contact that may never appear. It is precisely the kind of dull, exhausting, unglamorous work that...
Wings of War: From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation
The opening chapter of Wings of War — From Zeppelin to Sixth Generation, our series on how military aviation was invented, one breakthrough at a time.It is the first of November, 1911, and a young Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavotti is flying a flimsy Etrich...
India’s Home-Built Tejas Mk2 Nears First Flight
In a hangar outside Bengaluru, the most important aircraft India has built in a generation is being readied for the moment that matters most: leaving the ground. The Tejas Mk2 — bigger, sharper and far more capable than the little fighter that shares its name...
The Drone That Flies Off Carriers Without a Catapult
A catapult launch is one of the most violent things in aviation: zero to flying speed in two seconds, a punch that rattles teeth and bends steel. The General Atomics Mojave skips it entirely. This is a drone big enough to carry missiles — and it can lumber off...
Denmark’s Famous Red F-16 Heads to Argentina
Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the star of...
Europe’s €100 Billion Fighter Just Died
On a grey June morning at the ILA Berlin air show, the most ambitious warplane Europe never built quietly ceased to exist. The Future Combat Air System — FCAS, or SCAF to the French — was meant to give France, Germany and Spain a sixth-generation fighter...
Can I Fly an F-14 Tomcat?
“I feel the need — the need for speed.” “Talk to me, Goose.” Four decades after Top Gun first lit up the screen, those lines still make grown adults want to sprint to the nearest aircraft carrier. And almost all of them, sooner or later,...
The Airplane You Inflated With a Pump
Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle swells,...
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