RAF Typhoons Get £30K Drone-Killer Rockets
For thirty thousand pounds you can buy a used Mini Cooper. You can also, it turns out, buy a single shot of Britain’s newest fighter-jet drone-killer — and the Royal Air Force has just proved that the maths works. BAE Systems confirmed this week that an RAF...
Russia Stations Full Combat Aviation Group in Mali
The grass strip outside Bamako has been busy. Russian transport aircraft have been touching down for weeks, off-loading equipment, fuel pallets, and crates that locals say are too heavy to be hand luggage. Now satellite imagery has confirmed what defence analysts had...
AFRL Just Got a Pentagon-Mandated Makeover
The Air Force Research Laboratory — the organisation that, over the decades, has pushed everything from the F-117 stealth shape to the X-51 hypersonic scramjet test vehicle into existence — is being restructured. The Pentagon confirmed this week that AFRL will be...
70th Hawkeye Delivered: The Navy’s Eyes Get a New Pair
Northrop Grumman has just delivered the seventieth E-2D Advanced Hawkeye to the U.S. Navy. The aircraft itself looks essentially identical to the seventieth Hawkeye built — the same twin-turboprop, the same enormous radar dome on the back, the same boxy fuselage that...
From F-22 Cockpit to Lockheed Aeronautics’ Corner Office
The most powerful aviation job in America just went to a man who used to fly F-22s for a living. Lockheed Martin has named a former U.S. Air Force Raptor pilot to lead Lockheed Martin Aeronautics — the division that builds the F-22, the F-35, the C-130, and whatever...
Space Force Drops $4 Billion on Andromeda Spy Satellites
The U.S. Space Force has just added four billion dollars to a contract called Andromeda. Most readers will, understandably, have never heard of Andromeda. That is, in some sense, the point. Andromeda is the cover name for what amounts to America’s...
The P-8A Poseidon Just Got Sharper: Block 2 Goes Live
Most aviation news arrives with a roar. This one arrives with a quiet announcement that, somewhere over the cold North Atlantic, a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon is now flying in a configuration that can probably hear a Russian submarine before the submarine knows it is...
The Pentagon Is Quantum-Proofing the F-35
The F-35 Lightning II is, by some margin, the most networked combat aircraft ever built. A single jet exchanges several gigabytes of data per sortie with other F-35s, with E-3 and E-7 controllers, with ground stations, and — through the Multifunction Advanced Data...
Sikorsky Just Bolted Hellfires Onto the Black Hawk
Sikorsky has just turned the world’s most-built combat helicopter into a gunship. The Connecticut-based Lockheed Martin subsidiary has unveiled what it is calling the Armed Black Hawk — a clean-sheet conversion kit that bolts external pylons, sensor turrets, and...
GJ-21: China’s Stealth UCAV Is Almost Ready to Go to Sea
The People’s Liberation Army Navy is on the verge of doing something the U.S. Navy has been trying — and quietly failing — to do for fifteen years: operate a stealth, jet-powered, flying-wing combat drone from the deck of an amphibious assault ship. Fresh...
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