The World’s First Unmanned AWACS Just Took Off
An airborne early warning aircraft is not, technically, a stealth platform. It is the opposite of stealth. The whole point of an AEW airframe is that it is up there, loud in the radio spectrum, broadcasting a powerful surveillance radar so it can see incoming threats...
Birth of the Snake: How Bell Built the AH-1 Cobra in Eight Months
The Bell AH-1 Cobra is the most consequential helicopter design in American military history. Before the Cobra, every armed helicopter in the world was a transport airframe with weapons bolted onto it — a Huey with door guns, a Mi-4 with rocket pods, a Wessex with...
UAE Builds Massive Cope Cages Over Its Oil Facilities
The cope cage is a Russian invention. It started as a piece of welded mesh hammered onto the turret of a T-72 in Ukraine in 2022, a frantic improvisation to detonate Ukrainian top-attack munitions a half-metre above the armour rather than against it. Since then it has...
A British Weapon Finally Flies Inside an F-35B
For more than a decade, the UK’s F-35B Lightning II programme has been chasing a single technical milestone that politicians, MPs, and the Royal Air Force itself have all asked about repeatedly: when will the F-35B be able to actually fire a British weapon. The...
What Actually Happens After a Mid-Air Collision: Inside the NTSB Investigation
When two aircraft collide in mid-air — as happened recently with an EA-18G Growler at Mountain Home Air Force Base — the debris field can stretch for miles. Pieces of aluminum, wiring, and avionics scatter across terrain in patterns that look random to the untrained...
Pentagon Finally Releases F-16 Cockpit Footage of Lake Huron UAP Shootdown
On 12 February 2023, a week after a Chinese spy balloon had been shot down over the Atlantic, two days after an object had been downed over Alaska, and one day after a similar object had been destroyed over the Yukon, a third unidentified aerial phenomenon was tracked...
Turkey’s Hürjet Trainer Just Grew Weapons Pylons
The Turkish Aerospace Industries Hürjet has, until this month, been pitched to international customers as an advanced jet trainer — the natural successor to the BAE Hawk, the South Korean KAI T-50, the Italian M-346. A 100% Turkish-designed, supersonic, twin-seat...
Red Arrows Cut to Seven Jets: Why Britain’s Diamond Nine Has Gone
The Diamond Nine is to the British what the Blue Angels’ Delta is to the Americans: a closing formation so tight and so visually unforgettable that for almost sixty years it has been the single most iconic shape in the sky over Britain. Nine red BAE Hawk T1s in...
The Cosmonaut Who Outlived His Own Country
On 18 May 1991, Soyuz TM-12 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Strapped into the centre seat was a flight engineer named Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev. The launch went perfectly. The docking with the Mir space station...
On 9/11, a Female F-16 Pilot Was Ordered to Ram an Airliner
The afterburners on her F-16 still burned cold-blue when First Lieutenant Heather “Lucky” Penney shoved the throttle through the gate. It was 10:42 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Her jet carried no missiles. No live ammunition — only about a hundred...
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