Sonobuoys and MAD: How Patrol Aircraft Hunt Submarines
Share this story A submarine’s whole purpose is to disappear. It hides beneath hundreds of metres of dark, noisy water, moving slowly and quietly. Finding one from an aircraft flying overhead sounds almost impossible. Yet maritime patrol crews have been doing it...
Lavochkin La-5: The Soviet Fighter Saved by a Radial Engine
Share this story In the spring of 1942, Semyon Lavochkin was in trouble. His LaGG-3 fighter had a poor reputation at the front, it had cost him Stalin’s favour, and the factories building it were being switched over to Yakovlev fighters. His design bureau was...
Salt Lake City’s MiG-21 Will Be Scrapped at The Leonardo
Share this story For ten years, a Cold War fighter hung in the air over downtown Salt Lake City. Visitors to The Leonardo looked up and saw a former Polish Air Force MiG-21, red-and-white checkerboard on its tail, flying above a gleaming Convair C-131 Samaritan. Now...
Lithuania Drone Was a Ukrainian FP-1 Aimed at St Petersburg
Share this story On Sunday morning, people in northern Lithuania were told to take shelter. An unidentified drone was crossing the country, NATO fighters were climbing to find it, and nobody yet knew whose it was. Then it came down near the village of Juodžionys and...
Austrian Airlines OS82: Bomb Threat, MiG-29 Escort, Landing in Sofia
Share this story The Austrian Airlines A320 was two hours out of Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, with 51 passengers in the cabin and Vienna still more than an hour away, when the crew received the message every airline crew dreads: a bomb threat against their flight. They...
MOAB: The “Mother of All Bombs” Explained
Share this story It is too big for a bomber. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, better known by its unofficial name, the “Mother of All Bombs”, weighs nearly ten tonnes and is pulled out of the rear cargo door of a C-130 by a parachute. It has been...
Fat Albert: The Blue Angels’ C-130J Workhorse
Share this story Six blue-and-gold jets get the screams. But before any of them roll down the runway, somebody has to haul the spare parts, the tool chests and about 40 people to the show. For more than half a century, that somebody has been a big, blue,...
How Fighter Jets Shoot Down Drones: Guns, Sidewinders and Cost
Share this story At 17:43 on Saturday, 17 October 2026, two F-16s of the Romanian Air Force roared off the runway at the 86th Air Base at Borcea. Radar had picked up a group of targets about 120 kilometres east of Snake Island, heading south-west. Twenty-two minutes...
Carrier Strike Group Explained: What Sails With an Aircraft Carrier
Share this story On Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, families waved from Portsmouth’s Round Tower as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out to sea for the second phase of Operation Firecrest. She sails to take charge of the UK Carrier Strike Group in the North...
Airspeed AS.39 Fleet Shadower: Britain’s Four-Engined Night Stalker
Share this story Picture a moonless night in the North Sea. Somewhere below, an enemy battle squadron is steaming hard, blacked out. Above it, at little more than 40 knots, a strange four-engined monoplane drifts along at 1,500 feet, its crew peering into the dark and...
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