Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story It has no fuselage, no fin and no tailplane, and it looks like something from the 1980s rather than 1945. The Horten Ho 229 is one of the most photographed German aircraft of the Second World War, and it is usually described as the world’s first...
Share this story The US Navy has picked Boeing to build its next carrier fighter. On Tuesday 29 September 2026, the Pentagon announced that Boeing had won the F/A-XX competition against Northrop Grumman, with a full-scale development contract valued at more than $20...
Share this story Modern fighters carry missiles that can hit a target they will never see. Radar finds it, a data link tracks it, and a missile covers the last 50 or 100 kilometres on its own. Yet for most of the jet age, one of the most important rules in air combat...
Share this story In the first nine months of 2026, Ukrainian military units ordered more than 590,000 drones through a single online marketplace. The number alone is remarkable. What they chose to buy is more telling: the most ordered category is no longer the FPV...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
Share this story There were several news helicopters over Chatsworth on the evening of 15 September. A Metro bus and an SUV had collided in the west San Fernando Valley and people had died, so the aircraft that cover Los Angeles from above had gathered, as they do....
Share this story For years the argument about the world’s best-connected airport was really an argument between Heathrow, Schiphol and Frankfurt, with Dubai lurking. On 16 September that stopped being true. OAG published Megahubs 2026 and Istanbul is first. Not...
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
Share this story It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that “best” is four or five different questions...
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