Many fighter pilots and tacticians will say that if you’ve got into within-visual range air combat then something has gone very wrong. Why not zap the enemy at very long range and run away rather than ...

Abraham Lincoln noted that America will never be destroyed from the outside. Likewise the most serious threats to the US aircraft industry have always come from within, as demonstrated by the ...

Bing Chandler is a former Lynx Observer (think Weapon Systems Officer) who has since spent far too much time arguing about helicopters while working at Joint Helicopter Command, and the Army Air Corps ...

Commander Nigel David ‘Sharkey’ Ward, DSC, AFC is a retired British Royal Navy officer who commanded 801 Naval Air Squadron during the Falklands War. We asked him his view on British air operations ...

The Soviet Union lasted a mere sixty-nine years (the Spitfire has been flying longer), but in that time produced some of the largest, fastest, toughest and most agile aircraft. Even now, 25 years ...

The F-14 fighter garnered global fame as the star of the extremely American Top Gun film, but in an unlikely twist of fate, the vast bulk of the Tomcat’s air combat experience actually took place in ...

What was the best fighter of World War II? The evolution of fighters in this period was a Darwinian bloodbath that would have had Richard Dawkins slavering with excitement. Whatever we put in this ...

Aerospace Engineer Joe Wilding examines why the Mustang was so good. “I want to start with an embarrassing confession. With a lifelong obsession with aircraft and a few decades of experience ...

The dream of a supersonic STOVL (Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing) fighter has been striven toward for over half of the history of heavier-than-air flight. When the F-35B reaches real operational ...

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 deserve ...

Unlikely as it is, the main competitor of the F-35 is the Saab Gripen-E. These two fighter types, are as different as they could get, one akin to a bulky people carrier, the other a stripped-down ...

Boredom is in the eye, or perhaps gall bladder, of the beholder. When I was growing up in Norfolk (my origin proving my credentials for this task) I thought that the pairs of A-10s that flew over ...