The Fairey Fulmar was the F-14 Tomcat of its day, and I will prove it. Comparing the Fairey Fulmar to the Grumman F-14 Tomcat ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Commander Nigel David ‘Sharkey’ Ward, DSC, AFC is a retired British Royal Navy officer who commanded 801 Naval Air Squadron during the Falklands War. We asked him his view on British air operations ...

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 ...

For whatever reason, there is no published Spitfire count of victories – or at least not one I could find. It is in this apparent absence of this vital information, people have laid claim that the ...

The first working submarine appears to have been invented as long ago as 1620 by Cornelius Van Drebbel whose demonstration of his creation on the Thames was recorded by Constantijn Huygens (below).

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...