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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 P-47 Thunderbolt was the most versatile fighter aircraft of the Second World War. It was not “best in class” in any category, however, it was very good in just about every category. Fast, ...

Bing Chandler is a former Lynx Observer (think Weapon Systems Officer) who has since spent far too much time arguing about helicopters while working at Joint Helicopter Command, and the Army Air Corps ...

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 ...

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 ...

It was my last long cross-country flight from Schleswig NAS via Lossiemouth, Scotland to Keflavik NAS in Iceland, back in July 1982. It was the year I left the Starfighter to fly Tornados. MY LAST big ...

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 ...