F/A-XX: The Pentagon Picks the Navy’s 6th-Gen Fighter in August
The most important procurement decision in American naval aviation this decade will be made in August. Two companies — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — are competing for the F/A-XX contract, the programme to build the United States Navy’s sixth-generation...
BlitzBox: DARPA Wants Drone Swarms Hidden in Shipping Containers
It looks like a shipping container. The kind you see stacked on cargo ships, sitting in port yards, or riding the back of a flatbed truck. Twenty feet long, corrugated steel, anonymous. You could drive past a thousand of them without a second glance. Open the doors,...
USS Nimitz Enters Caribbean as Surveillance Flights Buzz Cuba
The oldest aircraft carrier in the United States Navy is now the most politically charged vessel in the Western Hemisphere. USS Nimitz (CVN-68), with Carrier Air Wing 17 and the guided-missile destroyer USS Gridley in company, entered the Caribbean Sea in late May...
Banned Russian Cluster Bombs Found in Mali: Bellingcat Investigation
Hundreds of metal spheres fall from the sky over the village of Tadjmart in northern Mali on the night of 16–17 May. They are roughly the size of an orange. When they hit the ground, they explode. One child is killed. Three women are injured. In the morning, villagers...
Poland Scrambles Every Fighter Jet as Russia’s Largest Barrage Nears NATO Airspace
Midnight. The radar screens at Poland’s Operational Command light up like a switchboard. Across the border in Ukraine, the sky fills with roughly 600 Russian drones and 90 missiles — cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, every category of aerial threat Moscow can...
Three Hours Blind: Russia Jams RAF Jet Carrying UK Defence Secretary
The GPS display goes blank. Smartphones lose their signal. Laptops cannot reach the internet. For three hours, the Royal Air Force Dassault Falcon 900LX carrying British Defence Secretary John Healey flies through electronic darkness over the Baltic Sea — and the...
How Half a Centimetre of Ice Destroyed the X-31
On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed a US$ 1.7 billion German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal it formed on was a pitot probe — a...
Convair R3Y Tradewind: The Turboprop Flying Boat the Navy Quietly Buried
For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters simultaneously from...
Bristol 188: The Stainless-Steel Jet That Could Not Reach Mach 2
The Bristol Type 188 was Britain’s answer to the X-15: a research aircraft designed to probe the “thermal barrier” — the speed regime above Mach 2 where aerodynamic heating starts to damage conventional aluminium airframes. To survive it, the...
The Flying Greenhouse: France’s 1928 Bomber That Fought WWII
If you ever wanted to know what 1928 thought a bomber should look like, the Amiot 143 is your answer. Boxy. Slab-sided. With a glasshouse gondola hanging from its belly like an afterthought welded on by a committee that had recently discovered the concept of windows....
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