MV-75 Confirmed: The V-22 Osprey’s Successor Is Real
The V-22 Osprey was, for two decades, the boldest aircraft in the U.S. inventory. A tiltrotor that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a turboprop — faster than any helicopter, more flexible than any C-130. It also killed dozens of Marines in its...
Marines Pick a Civilian Robinson R66 as Their First Pilot-Optional Military Helicopter
The U.S. Marine Corps just made a quiet but significant decision. For its Medium Aerial Resupply Vehicle – Expeditionary Logistics (MARV-EL) programme — the resupply helicopter that will fly Marines and pallets to forward island positions in a Pacific war...
Merlin Just Won $100M to Put AI in the Air Force’s C-130s
The C-130 Hercules is the most-flown military airlifter on earth. Lockheed has built more than 2,700 of them since 1956. They have dropped paratroopers into Panama, hauled refugees out of Kabul, gun-shipped over Vietnam, and refuelled half the planet’s special...
SOCOM Wants the World to Buy Its Terrain-Following Radar
For nearly twenty years, U.S. Special Operations Command has had a quiet, classified advantage. When the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — the Night Stalkers — takes an MH-47G Chinook into bad terrain at 30 metres above ground, in zero...
Pentagon Just Declared the F-35 TR-3 Upgrade “Unusable”
Lockheed Martin has delivered more than 1,200 F-35s. The Pentagon’s 2025 Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) report, published this spring, has now declared the most important upgrade to that fleet — Technology Refresh 3 — operationally...
Poland’s First F-35A Husarz Lands at Łask Airbase
The first three F-35As in Polish service — Poland calls them Husarz, the Hussar, after the winged cavalry that once broke Ottoman charges — touched down at Łask Air Base on 22 May 2026. They did so deep in central Poland, on the same flight line that has...
China’s ‘Bohai Sea Monster’ Just Got Its Clearest Photos Yet
In the 1960s, American spy satellites scanning the Caspian Sea brought back pictures of something that should not have existed: a 92-metre, jet-powered hybrid of ship and aircraft, skimming the water at 500 km/h. The CIA called it the Caspian Sea Monster. The Soviets...
The Football War 1969: Aviation’s Last Piston-Engine Dogfight
The afternoon of 17 July 1969 was warm and clear above Honduras. Captain Fernando Soto’s Vought F4U-5NL Corsair, FAH-609, climbed out of the haze and into the kind of light that fighter pilots talk about for the rest of their lives. He was about to fight the...
Bryan Allen: He Pedalled a Human-Powered Aircraft Across the English Channel
The Gossamer Albatross was made of carbon-fibre tubes, Mylar film, and piano wire. It weighed 31 kg. Its wingspan was 29 metres. It was powered by a single human being pedalling a bicycle mechanism connected to a pusher propeller at the rear. On 12 June 1979, Bryan...
A 68-Year-Old KC-135 Just Came Back From the Dead
The Davis-Monthan boneyard at Tucson, Arizona is the largest aircraft graveyard in the world. Four thousand-plus airframes from every era of postwar American military aviation sit baking in the desert sun under thick layers of preservative spraylat, waiting for the...
English
Recent Comments