By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a new biplane...
In December 1967, at the Dornier flight-test centre at Friedrichshafen, a strange aircraft lifted off the apron without using a runway. It had two main jet engines in conventional underwing pods and ten — yes, ten — additional pure lift engines clustered in pods at...
In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It cruised at Mach 2 — faster than any operational fighter then flying. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable streamlined pod slung beneath its...
It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let the tank glide...
Bill Allen, the buttoned-down chief executive of Boeing in 1955, was on a boat. So were the executives of every major airline in the United States — gathered on Lake Washington outside Seattle for the annual Gold Cup hydroplane race. Bill Allen had brought them there...
On 23 October 1934, at the Italian seaplane base of Desenzano del Garda on Lake Garda, a bright red aircraft with two enormous counter-rotating propellers screamed across the water at 440.681 miles per hour. The pilot, Warrant Officer Francesco Agello, climbed out of...
The cake was laced with sleeping pills. The whole squadron ate it. That was Captain Alexander Zuyev's plan, and on the night of 19 May 1989, at Mikha Tskhakaya air base in Soviet Georgia, it almost worked. The 27-year-old fighter pilot had decided he would steal one...
The NTSB has issued its final report on the fatal collision between a CRJ-900 regional jet and an airport fire truck at LaGuardia. The findings are blunt: the truck driver missed multiple direct warnings — visual, audible, and procedural — and crossed an active runway...
The crash that killed three UPS crew members at Louisville's Worldport hub in 2024 has just become a multi-defendant federal lawsuit. New filings name UPS, Boeing, the late captain's estate, and several other parties — and the language in the complaint suggests the...
The Airbus A220 has been the most underestimated commercial airliner of the past decade — a Canadian-designed jet (originally the Bombardier C Series) that quietly piled up loyal customers and stellar dispatch reliability while the headlines went to bigger aircraft....
Lufthansa Group ended its long widebody Airbus-only streak this week with a single, perfectly-balanced announcement: 10 Airbus A350-900s and 10 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners. Same order. Same press release. Same Monday morning. It is one of the most diplomatically...
Homestead Air Reserve Base sits 30 miles south of Miami. It survived Hurricane Andrew in 1992 by losing nearly every building it had. It has spent the three decades since flying F-16s on a quiet but consequential mission: counter-drug intercepts over the Caribbean and...
The Pentagon has finally put a date on the test that proves America can shoot down a hypersonic missile. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) confirmed last week that a counter-hypersonic live-fire intercept test is now scheduled for fiscal year 2027 — Mach 5 chasing Mach...
A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II transmitted an emergency 7700 code on its transponder while flying over the Gulf of Oman last week. The aircraft was at 10,500 feet over open water — well below normal F-35 cruising altitude — when it began squawking the universal...
Africa's most populous nation just received the first jet of a fleet that will reshape its air force. The Nigerian Air Force has formally rolled out its first Leonardo M-346FA — a light fighter built in Italy that combines the agility of an advanced trainer with the...
The U.S. Air Force has very few weapons that nobody else can match. The EA-37B Compass Call is one of them — a Gulfstream business jet stuffed with classified electronic-attack hardware that can shut down enemy radios, command nets, GPS, and air-defence radars across...
The MQ-9 Reaper is famous for one thing: putting a Hellfire missile through a window from 30,000 feet. But Hellfires cost about ,000 each, and the Air Force has burned through them at a rate the budget can no longer sustain. Enter the APKWS — a $20,000 laser-guided...
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