Taliban attack on Camp Bastion In response to the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaida, US and British forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001, supported by air power. Ten years later,…
The F4F Wildcat When the US Navy and US Marine Corps (USMC) went to war in December 1941, their primary carrier fighter was the tubby Wildcat, the first of Grumman’s…
The F-15 Streak Eagle was designed to break the time-to-climb records held by the F-4 and MiG-25 by setting new ones The F-15 proved to be a highly useful testbed…
‘The next pass was different. I said to Jim that our F-15 jockeys are the best in the world, let’s give them a challenge,’ Former SR-71 Blackbird pilot, Capt. Steve…
The Eagle’s AIM-7 Sparrow missile was significantly less powerful than the Phoenix missile system. Research revealed that 170 F-14 Tomcats could equal 290 F-15 Eagles in terms of defense The…
After WWII B-29 saw military service again in Korea between 1950 and 1953, battling new adversaries: the Soviet-built MiG-15 jet fighters When the huge VB-13 TARZON was first designed in…
Who could blame Vito, when approaching Moscow for the first time, felt his throat dry. Consequently, he reached into his pocket for a cough drop, but instead, he took out…
The survival kit carried by Blackbird’s pilots and RSOs included a few unconventional items, even though no SR-71 was ever shot down The Lockheed A-12 and YF-12A aircraft were the…
The SBD rear gunners fired as Saburo Sakai and his wingman closed the range. It was the high-scoring ace’s most harrowing and memorable combat of the war The US Navy…
‘Iowa the Air Traffic Controllers could not believe that they had an F-14 Tomcat under their control and so very low…500ft/152m,’ John Chesire, former US Navy F-14 Tomcat pilot The…