Boeing Eyes C-17 Globemaster Production Restart
A decade after Boeing shuttered the C-17 Globemaster III production line in Long Beach, California, the unthinkable is back on the table. Boeing says it is “encouraged” by restart discussions with multiple operators, and the House Armed Services Committee...
B-21 Raider Puts Combat Pilot in the Cockpit
For the first time in the history of modern flight testing, an operational combat pilot has taken the controls of a bomber still deep in its developmental test phase. On a recent sortie at Edwards Air Force Base, California, a pilot from the Air Force Operational Test...
No Drone Tech, No MiG-29s — Poland Holds Fighters Hostage
Poland’s remaining MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters are sitting on the ramp at Minsk Mazowiecki, going nowhere. Five months after Warsaw confirmed it would send the jets to Ukraine, the deal is frozen — and the reason is not politics, not logistics, not NATO hesitancy....
24 Lost, Maybe 9 Left — Russia’s Backfire Fleet Is Dying
A Tu-22M3 Backfire smashed into a field near Svirsk, Irkutsk Oblast, on June 15 — and all four crew members walked away. That sounds like good news. It is not. It is the third Backfire hull loss in two years, and Russia has almost none left to lose. The bomber was...
The B-36 That Flew With a Live Nuclear Reactor
Between 1955 and 1957, a B-36 bomber the size of a building flew over Texas and New Mexico with a live nuclear reactor humming in its belly. It was escorted everywhere by a planeload of armed Marines, ready to parachute down and seal off the area if it ever crashed....
The Cold War’s Secret Casualties
Their families were told they died in accidents, or simply that they were gone. For decades, the truth stayed locked in classified files: dozens of American airmen were shot out of the sky on secret reconnaissance flights along the edges of the Soviet Union and China...
The Navy Fighter With a Propeller AND a Jet
In 1946, the U.S. Navy flew a fighter that couldn’t decide whether it belonged to the propeller age or the jet age — so it used both at once. The Ryan XF2R Dark Shark had a turboprop in the nose spinning a four-bladed propeller, and a turbojet buried in...
Two Engines, One Nose: Japan’s Kawasaki Ki-64
Japan’s Kawasaki Ki-64 tried to solve a basic problem of fighter design — how to get the power of two engines without the drag of two engines — with an answer of beautiful, doomed complexity. It hid one engine in the nose and a second one behind the...
The Highest a Jet Has Ever Flown
The highest a jet has ever flown under its own power is not an American record, and it is nearly half a century old. On August 31, 1977, Soviet test pilot Alexandr Fedotov zoom-climbed a MiG-25 to 37,650 metres — 123,523 feet — and no air-breathing...
Why Was a Navy Test Squadron Flying an F-35A?
Plane-spotters caught something slightly out of place: the U.S. Navy’s premier test and evaluation squadron flying an Air Force jet. VX-9, the Navy’s “Vampires” at China Lake, was observed operating an F-35A — the conventional, land-based...
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