Not all aircraft leave the drawing board, and even those that reach the prototype stage are not necessarily destined for ...

1946 was the zenith of piston-engined fighters. The bloody lessons learnt from the hundreds of thousands of dogfights fought in the War had been carefully noted by designers. This knowledge had been ...

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 ...

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 ...

When compiling this list of terrible French aircraft we ran up against an unexpected problem: France hasn’t made many terrible aeroplanes. In creating features on the worst British, American and ...

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 ...

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 ...

I was wrong. I wanted to write about the Planet Satellite because I thought it was merely an obscure, attractive failure. However, the more I researched the Satellite’s story, the more bizarre it ...

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 ...

The ‘AMRAAM Age’ is over, once the weapon that separated the ‘haves’ from the ‘have-nots’, the ‘Slammer’ is now outmatched by a new breed of long range air-to-air missiles. The PL-15 in China and the ...

The Soviet Union had its fair share of brilliant aeronautical engineers and aircraft designers. The likes of Ilyushin, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, Tupolev, and the rest became household names, even in the West.

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 ...