86 Years Ago Today: The F4U Corsair Takes Its First Flight
Eighty-six years ago today, at 11:42 in the morning on 29 May 1940, a young Vought-Sikorsky test pilot named Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in...
Congress Pushes Back on Air Force Plan to Slash MH-139 Grey Wolf Buy
The Air Force quietly proposed cutting its planned MH-139A Grey Wolf helicopter buy in half. Congress is just as quietly pushing back. Lawmakers from both parties have written language into the draft fiscal year 2027 defence bill requiring the Air Force to procure the...
Night Stalker MH-47 Chinooks Could Become Their Own Tankers
The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — the famous Night Stalkers — wants to give its MH-47G Chinooks a job they have never had before: aerial refuelling tanker. Documents disclosed this month confirm the regiment is studying the modifications that would let...
Airbus Quietly Courts Saab as Europe’s 6th-Gen Fighter Breaks Apart
Europe’s flagship sixth-generation fighter project is falling apart in slow motion — and now Airbus is quietly reaching out to Sweden’s Saab. The conversations, first reported this week, would have been unthinkable five years ago. They are not unthinkable...
Navy Eyes Super Hornets to Replace the Last F-5 Aggressors
For three decades, the small, sharp F-5N Tiger II has played the bad guy at the US Navy’s adversary squadrons. Painted in Russian and Chinese splinter schemes, the little 1960s-vintage fighter has been the loyal MiG stand-in for thousands of Topgun students....
Israel’s First KC-46A ‘Gideon’ Tanker Lands at Nevatim
The Israeli Air Force has a new tanker — and a new name on its tail. The first KC-46A “Gideon” arrived at Nevatim Air Base on 27 May, the first of four Boeing tankers Israel signed for at the height of the F-35I fleet expansion. After years of patching...
MQ-28 Ghost Bat Lands in California for Its First US Flights
The MQ-28 Ghost Bat just made its US debut — not in a hangar, not at an airshow, but in the air. Boeing confirmed on 27 May 2026 that its Australian-built autonomous combat drone has completed three operational flights over the Point Mugu Sea Range at US Naval Base...
Ukraine Inks €2.5 Billion Gripen E Deal With Sweden
Stockholm, 28 May 2026. Volodymyr Zelensky walked onto the apron at Linköping under a grey Swedish sky, shook hands with Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, and signed what is — by any measure — the largest Western fighter package Ukraine has ever secured. The headline...
Higher, Higher and Higher: Aviation in Soviet Propaganda (Series Overview)
On 23 March 1923, in a Moscow rehearsal hall above the Red Army’s central printing press, a 26-year-old Jewish composer named Yuli Khayt wrote a tune that would haunt Soviet history for the next seventy years. The lyrics, by Pavel Herman, were three verses long...
The SR-71 Blackbird Was Designed to Leak Fuel on the Ground
If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you will see one thing the museum guides will quietly refuse to explain: a small puddle of clear, kerosene-smelling liquid...
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