Curtiss Built a Fighter That Flew Tail-First
In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its engine at the...
Sweden’s Mach 2 Dragon That Flew From Roads
In the early 1950s, a neutral country of seven million people set out to build a supersonic interceptor that could hide in the forest, launch from a public road, and climb fast enough to catch a Soviet nuclear bomber over the Baltic. The result looked like nothing...
America’s Air War to Keep Hormuz Open
A commercial oil tanker was steaming through international waters toward Iran when a U.S. aircraft put Hellfire missiles into its smokestack. The ship stopped. It was, in the plainest terms, a blockade being enforced with air power — and it is happening every...
Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed multiyear framework...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force and DARPA have put...
Gliders, a Dictator, and an Impossible Takeoff
On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within a few minutes,...
America’s Robot Wingman Fires Its First Missile
Somewhere over the Mojave Desert this month, an aircraft with no pilot, no ejection seat and no name stenciled under a canopy did something no American drone had ever done. It fired an air-to-air missile at a target. The jet was Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury. The weapon was...
The Reaper Ran Out of Sky. What Comes Next?
For twenty years the MQ-9 Reaper ruled the skies over places where nobody could shoot back. It loitered for a day at a time, watched everything, and struck without warning. It was the defining weapon of an entire era of American war. And then it met an enemy that...
Checkmate: Russia’s Budget Stealth Bet Against the World
When Russia rolled a sleek single-engine stealth fighter onto the tarmac at the 2021 MAKS air show — complete with an aggressive marketing blitz and a signature perfume — the Su-75 Checkmate looked like Moscow’s answer to the F-35. Five years later, it has flown...
China Drills a Deck Crew for Its Newest Carrier
A carrier is only as capable as the people who work its deck. On 14 July 2026, the People’s Liberation Army Navy released imagery that made this point plainly: J-15-family fighters running full-cycle takeoff and landing training on land, methodically expanding the...
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