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 ...

From the perilous deck of an aircraft carrier, Pierre-Henri ‘Até’ Chuet took the Dassault Rafale M into combat in Iraq. We spoke to him to find out more about the Rafale, a remarkable fighting machine ...

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 ...

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 ...

How good is Russian air force training? A good question. It’s a complex topic and it is difficult to give a straightforward answer given that detailed data often isn’t available. The average number of ...

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 ...

The English Electric Lightning was the most exciting jet fighter ever created. When it entered service, in 1959, it was the most formidable fighter in the world. For twenty nine years it thundered ...

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 ...

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 ...