Dirk Reid swapped his RAF Tornado for a Saab Draken in the Royal Danish Air Force. Here he describes the excitement and idiosyncrasies of the fabulous Delta Dragon. “It was a single-seat, single-engined aircraft, yet went for 13 years without any hull loss – compare that with Jag … | Continue reading
Today is the big push to get The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 2 up to 100% funded. If I can ask a favour please share the hell out of this post and let’s do the impossible. Support simply by pre-ordering your copy here | Continue reading
The best fighter of the Second World War started life as an insurance policy. In late 1940 Grumman was asked to develop an upgrade of the F4-F Wildcat with a 1600hp Twin Cyclone engine as an interi… | Continue reading
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Weighing the same as a M60 main battle tank and capable of flying 600mph faster than an F-16, the Russian MiG-31 is an absolute beast of an interceptor. Cloaked in secrecy, few outsiders have flown… | Continue reading
The Soviet MiG-15 scared the bejesus out of US pilots in the Korean War. It was equal to the best American fighter, the F-86 Sabre, and in some respects it even had superiority. Nine years earlier,… | Continue reading
We asked 45 people to describe their favourite aircraft in only 200 words. Here are the results. MY FAVOURITE AEROPLANE IN 200 WORDS #1: THE A-26 (B-26) INVADER BY BRUNO BAYLEY “The Vietnam War; p… | Continue reading
“One of the most staggering facts about Sea Harrier and the Falklands was that we went to war less than three years after receiving the first aircraft in service and were fully prepared for c… | Continue reading
What makes an unusual design solution, and how have we selected the ten examples we are presenting in this article? Well, an ‘unusual design’ is clearly a flexible concept. As time and techn… | Continue reading
How did the United States, which invented the first fixed wing powered aircraft, fall so distantly behind the Europeans in military aviation by the end of World War I? The US got a slow start for s… | Continue reading
How do you destroy an unwanted aircraft from the ground? The first anti-aircraft weapon, the Ballonabwehrkanone (balloon defence cannon) or BaK was deployed in the Franco-Russian War of 1870… | Continue reading
Today we are quite used to aircraft such as the B-52 having been in service since the time of the dinosaurs but this is a relatively modern phenomenon. It was rare until well after the Second World… | Continue reading
The subject of Tejas, the Indian effort to build a light fighter aircraft, is a hot potato. Rabidly defended by its advocates, lampooned by its opponents and a source of both pride and frustration … | Continue reading
It seems hard to even mention Blackburn (‘Blackburn Aircraft Limited’ – and boy, weren’t they) without eliciting anecdotes about terrible, stolid, ugly or fatal aircraft. But does Blackburn deserv… | Continue reading
The F-16, the best designed fighter jet of the 20th century, has proved an excellent aircraft to modify, build upon and generally mess around with. Here are some of the unlikely Vipers that have fl… | Continue reading
Only two BV 155 B prototype high-altitude fighters were completed by Hamburg-based Blohm & Voss Flugzeugbau during the Second World War and today the last one sits largely forgotten in long-ter… | Continue reading
Image credit: I was wrong. I wanted to write about the Planet Satellite because I thought it was merely an obscure, attractive failure. However, the more I researched the Satellite’s story, the mor… | Continue reading
Born in the desperate last days of World War I, close air support is now over a hundred years old. From the trench-strafing carnage of the 1910s, via the murderous Spanish Civil War, close a… | Continue reading
Historically, there’s been lots of acquisitions of underhand play by European aircraft manufacturers. There’s the oft-cited (and certainly false) claim that Dassault was inspired… | Continue reading
In 1971, Indian Air Force Gnats fought Pakistan’s Sabres in ferocious bloody dogfights. Despite only weighing the same as a a Dodge Durango, the tiny jet fighter proved a formidable machine. … | Continue reading
Pariah states and those seeking independence from the traditional plane-making nations have repeatedly attempted to go it alone and built their own fighter aircraft. All of the following pro… | Continue reading
Have you ever seen a homemade gun? At the National Army Museum in Chelsea, London, there is a fascinating display of guns made for the IRA. These were not factory produced but cobbled together in s… | Continue reading
At the Paris Air Show, Turkish Aerospace displayed a model of the TF-X fighter. Turkey has never designed an advanced combat aircraft before, and the aircraft is symbolic of the nation’s new … | Continue reading
We’ve interviewed a bunch of warplane pilots- here are some them: Saab JA 37 Viggen Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-19 Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 Mikoyan MiG-27 ‘Flogger’ BAE Systems Hawk Miko… | Continue reading
Creating a supersonic stealthy vertical take-off fighter is an extremely difficult task, and years of studies —and a healthy handful of initialisms and acronyms — paved the path to today’s F-… | Continue reading
Imagine the danger and excitement of landing on the surface of the sea in a high performance fighter. There were aircraft that did just this, Canadian historian and professional recycler Stephen Ca… | Continue reading
Twenty years prior to 1969 most air forces had been flying piston-engined fighters essentially no different from those of World War II. In the following twenty years, top speeds almost quadrupled a… | Continue reading
Imagine a world without Danny DeVito, Roger Daltrey and George Lucas. There’s a parallel universe where Rick Moranis played Schwarzenegger’s brother in Twins, where The Who never happen… | Continue reading
Jim Smith had significant technical roles in the development of the UK’s leading military aviation programmes. From ASRAAM and Nimrod, to the JSF and Eurofighter Typhoon. We asked him to predict th… | Continue reading
A hundred years ago the armistice of November 11th 1918 ended the fighting on the Western Front and largely brought to a close four years of continuous frenetic aviation development. Had the fighti… | Continue reading
Jim Smith had significant technical roles in the development of the UK’s leading military aviation programmes, from ASRAAM and Nimrod, to the JSF and Eurofighter Typhoon. He was asked by the Britis… | Continue reading