Deep dives on military aircraft — fighters, bombers, and the missions that made them legendary.
Jimmy Carter cancelled it, Ronald Reagan revived it, and the Cold War ended before it could fly its mission. The full story of the B-1B Lancer — the Bone — from the 1977 cancellation to Operation Epic Fury, plus the 2013 Montana crash and the cattle-road claim that followed it.
A medium bomber has no business taking off from an aircraft carrier. Sixteen of them did it anyway, and that was only the second-strangest thing anyone asked this airplane to do. At 8:20 on the morning of 18 April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle released the brakes on a twin-engine bomber sitting at the extreme
He could not walk and he could not speak. They put the model in his hands anyway — and gave him back the thirty years the Air Force had taken. In the spring of 1980, a group of engineers from Northrop drove to a house in Santa Barbara County, California, carrying something they were not
The first stealth aircraft in history was built out of a Soviet math paper nobody in Moscow thought was worth classifying — and for most of a decade, the men who flew it could not tell their own families it existed. In the first hours of January 17, 1991, the sky over Baghdad was the
What the US Air Force and Navy actually fly in 2026 — MQ-9 Reaper, MQ-25 Stingray, CCA fighter drones and Navy underwater drones — plus how the law of war really applies, from a retired Air Force JAG.
US Military Drones: How a Spy Camera Learned to Shoot Back Read More »
The Curtiss P-40 was the fighter nobody wanted. Flown by American mercenaries on fake passports, wearing a shark mouth borrowed from an RAF squadron in Egypt, it produced one of the most lopsided combat records of WWII.
P-40 Warhawk and the Flying Tigers: The Story Behind Aviation’s Most Famous Shark Mouth Read More »
A field guide to WWII nose art — American and Allied. What the pin-ups, Disney cartoons, lucky cats, shark mouths, RAF colour-coded bombs, and Soviet dedications actually meant.
How to Read WWII Nose Art: What the Pin-Ups, Cartoons & Symbols Meant Read More »
Subsonic, gunless, and honestly kind of ugly — and for thirty years, the best all-weather attack airplane in the world. If you’ve ever read Stephen Coonts’ novel Flight of the Intruder, you already know the feeling — the one the book gets so right and the movie only half-captured: two men wedged shoulder to shoulder
Its first combat mission was a massacre. Its torpedoes barely worked. And by the end of the war it was sinking the biggest battleships ever built. On June 4, 1942, six brand-new Grumman TBF Avengers took off from Midway to attack the Japanese fleet. Five never came back. The one that did was so shot
TBF Avenger: The Torpedo Bomber That Died Hard, Then Won Read More »
It couldn’t dogfight. It could barely defend itself. And it may have done more to win the Pacific than any fighter that gets the glory. Every airplane we’ve covered so far — the Corsair, the Hellcat, the Dauntless — was built to fight. The Consolidated PBY Catalina was built to look. It was a slow,
PBY Catalina: The Flying Boat That Found the Fleet at Midway Read More »