Editors' Picks
What the astronauts really said
Apollo "onboard voice" recordings captured the moon astronauts' conversations -- cussing and all -- when no one else was listening.
Drones for Hire
The newest eyes in the sky are drawing the attention of power companies, conservation groups, and the ACLU.
Five Reasons to Like NASA’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission
So it's not the Moon or Mars. Get over it.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Disaster at Xichang
An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about history’s worst launch accident.
Page 10 of 20
In March 1999, during the Kosovo War, as Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko piloted his F-117, he saw two missiles punch through the bottom of the clouds. The unbelievable had happened: A Serbian surface-to-air missile had locked on to his aircraft. Zelko was able to eject, and was rescued shortly after...
April 19, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
On April 13, Bonhams auction house will offer a 1917 Curtiss MF "Seagull" Flying Boat for sale. The MF (which stands for "Modernised F-boat") was developed in 1917 from the original F model, a design the U.S. Navy had been using since 1912/1913. (The F model was the most successful of the pre-war C...
April 09, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
Lockheed Martin's F-35B Lightning II fighter hit another mark in its test program on March 18: the first vertical landing. Pilot Graham Tomlinson gently descended from a height of 150 feet after hovering for a minute above the runway at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Watch for yourse...
March 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The 31 members of Class 136, U.S. Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, which graduated last December, pitched in on a deluxe jet plane kiddie ride, wearing Test Pilot School livery and signed by each student. Says Damon Carson of Kiddie Rides USA, "The commanding officer and other st...
March 11, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
Last week, a third Lockheed Martin F-35B—the coolest variant of the F-35, with its ability to take off vertically then go supersonic—joined two others already undergoing flight tests at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. (It's shown here leaving the Lockheed facility in Fort Worth, Texas...
February 24, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Russia's first "fifth-generation" fighter made its debut today on a snowy airfield in the country's far east.Sukhoi test pilot Sergey Bogdan took the company's PAK FA prototype aircraft on a 47-minute flight before returning to the factory runway at Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Bogdan reported that the new ...
January 29, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Boeing has released this video of a test conducted at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Alabama last September, during which the ground-based Laser Avenger weapon blew up 50 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of the kind used against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mounted on an armored vehicle,...
January 25, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
Today's offering is a post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of stories (okay, I'll stop with the alliteration).
First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who's been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 ...
November 30, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Size matters. (Well, at least in the surveillance world.)And three projects under way take dimensions to whole new lengths. The LEMV (it stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle) is a mammoth hybrid airship championed by the U.S. Army as part of a future fleet of reconnaissance vehicles...
November 17, 2009
| By Rebecca Maksel
According to a report in Flight International, India’s defense ministry is buying Russian-built MiG-29K fighters as "part of a 2004 order...that was incorporated into a deal for the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov.”Wait—India has an aircraft carrier?That navy workhorse, the aircraft carrier, has ...
November 12, 2009
| By Rebecca Maksel
They wouldn't be allowed to do it today, but back in 1959, experienced military pilots would sometimes buzz the Grand Canyon when flying out of nearby Nellis AFB. At the time, RAF pilot Ron Dick was an exchange officer with the US Air Force, training students in a Lockheed T-33. Fellow instructor B...
November 04, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Last Wednesday, an as-yet-unnamed joyrider in a South African Air Force Pilatus PC-7 Mk. II turboprop inadvertently triggered his ejection seat while over Langebaanweg Air Force Base in the Western Cape Province. The passenger was blasted through the canopy within seconds, much to the astonishment ...
November 02, 2009
| By Pat Trenner
A hundred years ago today, the U.S. military got its first pilot. On October 26, 1909, Frederick E. Humphreys, a 26-year-old Lieutenant with the Army Signal Corps, soloed for the first time in a Wright Flyer at College Park, Maryland, under the watchful eye of no less an instructor than Wilbur Wrig...
October 26, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Boeing and the U.S. Air Force have been busy this summer testing the Advanced Tactical Laser, a high-power directed energy weapon mounted on a C-130H Hercules transport.In this August 30 test at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range , the laser was fired at a target for the first time, with the fo...
October 02, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Aerial warfare took another step into the robo-future on September 13 when a U.S. Air Force F-15E pilot was sent to destroy an out-of-control MQ-9 "Reaper" drone as it headed toward the Afghan border. It was the first time an errant Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) had to be shot down by a human pilot...
September 22, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
From the company that brought you the P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre, and F-100 Super Sabre came the F-107, North American's entry in a 1950s Mach 2 fighter-nuclear bomber competition. Though it was based on the F-100 design, evident in the wings, aft fuselage, and tail section, something went seriously ...
September 21, 2009
| By Pat Trenner
How we turned the A3D into a tanker.
July 2011
| By Hadley Dixon
Challenging the Helldiver’s bad reputation.
July 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
Take a fantasy flight in a real, live Liberator.
July 2011
| By Stephen Joiner
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Air & Space Interview
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