A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet just did something that sounds like it belongs in a video game — and the Pentagon released video to prove it. On May 8, 2026, a Super Hornet from USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) dropped precision-guided munitions straight down the...
There is a shipping container somewhere in the world right now that does not look like much. Steel box. Corner castings. Maybe a dent or two from a rough crossing. You have seen a million of them stacked at ports, rolling down highways on flatbeds, rusting in fields....
There is something quietly momentous about a small nation on the North Sea becoming the first foreign partner in what may prove to be the most consequential transformation in air power since the jet age. On 23 April 2026, the United States Air Force and the...
The U.S. Air Force has officially launched the paperwork to start looking for something — anything — to replace the B-52 Stratofortress. The BUFF has been flying since 1952, and the Air Force's plan is apparently to keep flying it until the airframes are old enough to...
\n\nThe morning of May 6, 2026, was clear over the Culili Point sand dunes south of Laoag. A six-wheeled launcher — Japanese, bearing the roundel of the Ground Self-Defense Force — sat squat in the sand, its six canisters pointed west toward open water. At 10:30 a.m.,...
On 7 May 2026, South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) issued a declaration that aviation analysts had been watching for three years: the KF-21 Boramae is fully combat suitable. Three years of exhaustive testing. Six prototype airframes. More...
On the morning of 5 May 2026, in a vast exhibition hall on the European shore of Istanbul, something quietly extraordinary happened. Turkey's Ministry of National Defence unveiled — with little prior warning to the international press — a full-scale mockup of the...
There is a sound that no aviation fan forgets. A rising howl of twin Pratt & Whitney TF30s at full afterburner, the variable-geometry wings sweeping back as the jet accelerates from a carrier deck at a rate that seems almost physically offensive — as if physics...
She landed in a farmer's field outside Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on 21 May 1932, and the farmer who came running across the grass asked her if she had come far. "From America," she said. She had been flying for 14 hours and 56 minutes, in a Lockheed Vega with a...
Imagine a fighter that crashes one in every four times it tries to land on a carrier. A fighter whose engines flame out so often the squadron commander tells his pilots to assume both have failed before every approach. A fighter so universally hated that the deck...
On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver was flying an SR-71 Blackbird at 78,000 feet over New Mexico at Mach 3.18. Behind him sat reconnaissance systems officer Jim Zwayer. They were testing a new navigation system when the aircraft's right engine suffered a...
The aircraft was 6.07 metres long. It carried a 1,200-kilogram warhead in its nose. The cockpit had a basic compass, an airspeed indicator, and a single switch that started three solid-fuel rocket motors. There was no landing gear. There was no parachute. The pilot,...
Bessie Coleman walked into every flying school in Chicago and was turned away from every one. The year was 1919. No American flight school would accept a student who was both Black and a woman. Most would not accept her for either reason alone. A lesser person would...
On 27 September 1956, Captain Mel Apt of the US Air Force became the first human being to fly faster than three times the speed of sound. He was at 65,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base, in California, dropped from beneath the wing of a Boeing B-50 Superfortress,...
Take a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress. Remove the nose. Bolt a jet engine where the bombardier used to sit. Now fly it. That is not a thought experiment. From 1947 to 1966, the Curtiss-Wright Corporation did exactly that — operating a modified B-17G as an airborne...
One hundred years ago today — 9 May 1926 — a Fokker F.VII trimotor named Josephine Ford took off from a snow strip on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, climbed to 1,500 feet, and disappeared north into the Arctic dawn. Fifteen and a half hours later it landed back...
The morning of 16 April 1912 was perfect — or so it seemed. Harriet Quimby stood at Folkestone, England, in her trademark plum-coloured flying suit, preparing to become the first woman to fly the English Channel. There was one problem. Fog had rolled in over the...
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