Max Grünwald, Autor bei MiGFlug.com Blog

Kelly Johnson built the F-104 Starfighter to do one thing: climb fast, fly high, and kill Soviet bombers before they reached American cities. The Lockheed engineer surveyed Korean War fighter pilots in 1951 and concluded that what they wanted was not another heavy,...

India Unveils Its First AI-Piloted Fighter Concept

A Bengaluru startup has just thrown India’s hat into the ring of autonomous combat aviation. Flying Wedge Defence & Aerospace (FWDA) has unveiled the FWD Supreme — an AI-piloted fighter concept designed to fly, fight, and make tactical decisions without a...

China’s Tailless Fighter Just Showed It Can Turn

One question has shadowed China’s J-36 since it first flew: a tailless aircraft can be stealthy and stable, but can it actually manoeuvre? New footage circulating online appears to answer it. The big, three-engined sixth-generation prototype is seen pulling a...

The Fighter That Flew as Both Prop and Jet

Most fighters carry the engine in the nose and the propeller out front. The Swedish Saab 21 did the opposite: it put the engine behind the pilot and the propeller at the very back, spinning between two slender tail booms. It was an elegant answer to an old problem...

The Mach 3 Interceptor With No Windscreen

The Republic XF-103 was meant to do something no fighter of the early 1950s could: cruise at Mach 3 — three times the speed of sound — at the edge of the stratosphere, run down a Soviet bomber, and kill it with missiles. To get there, its designers made a...

The People’s Fighter: Heinkel’s He 162 Volksjäger Was Built in 72 Days to Be Flown by Children

In September 1944, with Allied bombers reducing German cities to rubble and the Luftwaffe haemorrhaging experienced pilots at an unsustainable rate, the Reich Air Ministry issued one of the most desperate specifications in aviation history: design a jet fighter that...

The Soviet Airliner That Flew on Hydrogen — In 1988

On 15 April 1988, a modified Tupolev Tu-154 airliner took off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airfield with one of its three engines running on liquid hydrogen. It climbed to altitude, flew a circuit, and landed without incident. The aircraft was designated Tu-155, and...

Die Luftwaffe will eine 1.000-Meilen-Rakete – und das verändert alles.

Die US-Luftwaffe hat stillschweigend eine der ambitioniertesten Waffenanforderungen der jüngeren Vergangenheit fallen gelassen: die Entwicklung einer neuen Luft-Luft-Rakete, die Ziele in einer Entfernung von mindestens 1.000 Seemeilen – umgerechnet etwa 1.150 Meilen – bekämpfen kann. Das entspricht ungefähr zehn...

Wie Fly-by-Wire die Kabel ersetzte und alles veränderte

Before the F-16, every fighter jet on earth had a direct mechanical link between the pilot’s stick and the control surfaces. Steel cables, push rods, bellcranks — a system fundamentally unchanged since the Sopwith Camel. In 1974, General Dynamics connected a...

The German Jump Jet That Lost to Math

It is a grey morning at Bremen, late in the summer of 1971. On the concrete apron stands a stubby, hunched little jet, its camouflage still factory-fresh, the marking VAK 191 B painted along the nose. Three engines spool up at once and the noise is physically violent...

The Aircraft That Had No Wings

It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth cylindrical body roughly...

Russia’s Trainer Grows Teeth: Yak-130M Flies