A Combat Pilot Just Flew the B-21 Raider
It sounds like paperwork: a pilot from one Air Force unit flew an aircraft alongside a pilot from another. Except the aircraft was the B-21 Raider — the most secret new warplane in the world — and one of the men at the controls was a frontline combat pilot, not a test...
Europe Rolls Out Its Robot Wingmen
For years, the race to build “robot wingmen” — uncrewed jets that fight alongside human pilots — looked like an American and Australian story. In a single week in June, Europe planted its flag.At the ILA air show in Berlin, two very different European players pulled...
The First F-35 in Wild Weasel War Paint
On 16 June a brand-new F-35A lifted off from Fort Worth, flew for about an hour, and came home behind a chase jet. Routine — except for two black letters painted on its tail: WW.Those letters make aircraft 24-5970 the first F-35 ever to wear the Wild Weasel tail code....
Turkey’s Radar-Killer Jet Steps Into View
It looks, at a glance, like a rich man’s toy: a sleek Bombardier business jet, the kind that ferries executives between capitals. Then you notice the lumps. A long blade running down its spine, blisters under the belly, a fairing crowning the tail — and suddenly the...
A $300,000 Hypersonic Missile for the Super Hornet
A hypersonic missile usually costs about as much as a small mansion — tens of millions of dollars per shot, hand-built, hoarded like crown jewels. The U.S. Navy just placed an order for a hypersonic missile it hopes to buy for the price of a modest house: somewhere...
Marines Land F-35Bs on a Finnish Highway
It costs north of a hundred million dollars, it is the most sophisticated fighter the United States builds, and on the morning of 9 June it was sitting on a two-lane road in the Finnish woods, taking on fuel with pine trees a wingspan away.Two U.S. Marine Corps F-35B...
Stalin’s Rocket Plane and the Devil’s Broomstick
On a freezing afternoon in May 1942, on a frozen lake near the Ural town of Bilimbay, a stubby green aeroplane the size of a fighter trainer crouched on the snow. It carried no propeller. In its tail sat a steel chamber fed by red fuming nitric acid and kerosene...
Four Firsts, Then Forgotten: The B-45 Tornado
On the morning of 17 March 1947, two test pilots lifted a four-engined jet off the hard-packed lakebed at Muroc, in the California high desert, and into a clear blue sky. The aircraft was ungainly, slab-sided, and unmistakably a product of the piston age with...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact loitering off the...
Boeing Won’t Build the Navy’s Next Trainer
Here is something you do not see every day: Boeing builds a brand-new jet trainer, wins the U.S. Air Force contract, and then tells the U.S. Navy, no thanks. On June 12, the company confirmed it will not bid the T-7A Red Hawk for the Navy’s Undergraduate Jet...
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