A year (and a gazillion maiden flights of new Chinese aircraft types) has passed. 2025 was a bugger for many, but it also had some cool moments in the world of aviation. Experimental aircraft are ...

The primary sensor of the modern fighter remains the radar. Up until the 1980s operating a radar effectively required a great degree of skill; today’s digital radars are simple to use, long-ranged and ...

Tactics, training and luck are the determining factors in who survives within visual range aerial combat. Despite the modern emphasis on beyond-visual-range combat, the vast majority of fighter versus ...

If you want something done slowly, expensively and possibly very well, you go to the British. While Britain created the immortal Spitfire, Lancaster and Edgley Optica, it also created a wealth of ...

“Care-free manoeuvring for sure. I came from flying the JA 37 Viggen, where you basically had to ‘do a Marty Feldman’, keeping one eye on the Angle-of-Attack meter, one on the G-meter and your last ...

The F-16, the best designed fighter jet of the 20th century, has proved an excellent aircraft to modify, build upon and generally mess around with. Here are some of the unlikely Vipers that have flown ...

The attack helicopter is costly and complex to operate, yet it is taking a mauling in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s full-scale invasion attempt of Ukraine starting in 2022 has shown both ...

Europe’s two middle-weight fighter aircraft, the Typhoon and Rafale, have fought tooth and nail for multi-billion Euro sales across the world. Geographically surrounded on four sides by the ...

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 ...

In 2015, Research Fellow at the RUSI Think-tank Justin Bronk, compared Europe’s two middle-weight fighter aircraft, the Typhoon and Rafale, The relatively subtle differences between these two superbly ...

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 ...

If you were unlucky enough to still be flying a piston-engined fighter in 1949 you’d better hope your enemy didn’t have jets. The piston age was over. Though the ultimate piston-engined fighters were ...