HAARP Over-the-Horizon Radar Test Detects Aircraft by Skywave
Share this story For three decades, the antenna field outside Gakona, Alaska, has been the most misunderstood radio transmitter in the world. Now the US military has given it a job conspiracy theorists never predicted: lighting up aircraft far beyond the horizon so...
MW-1: The Luftwaffe Tornado’s Cold War Bomblet Dispenser
Share this story If the Cold War had turned hot in Central Europe, one of West Germany’s main answers to waves of Warsaw Pact tanks would have been a box under the belly of a Tornado. The MW-1, short for Mehrzweckwaffe 1, or multi-purpose weapon 1, was a huge...
Operation Starvation: The B-29s That Mined Japan
Share this story Late on the afternoon of 27 March 1945, 102 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses lifted off from Tinian. The crews had been firebombing Japanese cities for weeks, but on this night their bomb bays carried no incendiaries. Each bomber held a dozen sea mines....
F-106 Delta Dart: The USAF’s Ultimate Interceptor
Share this story The alert call came at 12:25 a.m. on a black winter morning, with the temperature at 28 degrees below zero. Within 75 minutes, all 26 of the squadron’s interceptors stood ready on a snowbound flight line, and soon the pilots were strapped in,...
Dassault Mystère IV: France’s First Transonic Fighter Goes to War
Share this story Melun-Villaroche, 28 September 1952. Kostia Rozanoff, Dassault’s chief test pilot, lifts a silver prototype off the runway and stays aloft for 25 minutes. In level flight the new jet touches Mach 0.92, comfortably beyond what its designers had...
Hawker Typhoon: The Failed Interceptor That Ruled Normandy
Share this story On 9 May 1940, Hawker chief test pilot Philip Lucas looked over his shoulder and saw daylight. The fuselage of the brand-new fighter he was flying had split open just behind his seat. Instead of bailing out, he nursed the crippled prototype back to...
F-16 Next-Generation Mission Compute: A New Brain for Old Vipers
Share this story Somewhere behind the cockpit of every late-model US Air Force F-16 sits a box that does the thinking. It takes in radar tracks, weapons data and datalink traffic and turns them into what the pilot sees. On the Block 40/42 and 50/52 jets, that box...
Mysuru Dasara Air Show: Surya Kiran Beats the Rain on Day Two
Share this story Rain had the last word on Sunday. On Monday, 19 October 2026, the Indian Air Force’s Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team came back to Mysuru and flew the show the city had been waiting for. The team’s red-and-white BAE Hawk Mk132 jets arrived over...
Gotha Raids 1917: The Daylight Bombers That Hit London
Share this story Shortly before noon on Wednesday 13 June 1917, Londoners did something that now seems unthinkable. They stepped out of offices, shops and tea rooms and looked up. A formation of big biplanes was sliding across a clear summer sky towards the City, and...
USAF Test Pilot School Brings Back Water Landings in Amphibians
Share this story The people who will one day sign off on America’s next fighters spend most of their year in places like the Mojave Desert, where the runways are endless and the ground is bone dry. This autumn, some of them traded concrete for open water,...
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