Military Aviation

Some of the Air Force’s most expensive and strategically sensitive aircraft have been evacuated from Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, after it was flooded by the Missouri River over the weekend. At least nine aircraft were flown to other bases and crews were working around the clock to try to protect facilities that […]

Military aviation forums are buzzing with reaction to a Facebook posting by the Dutch-based Scramble Magazine that four F-117 Nighthawks were pulled out of retirement and snuck into Syria to fly clandestine missions on behalf of the U.S. in 2017. Giving some credence to the report, which is classified as a rumor by most military […]

This week, AVweb’s blog space will feature a two-part story from James Belton, a Gen X pilot who has done what the previous generation of pilots could not: Evolved from pistons, to jets, to drones. Here’s part one. When I was a young man, I desperately wanted to fly. I wanted to fly fighter jets […]

That telltale trail of smoke from the Air Force’s longest serving airframe will soon be a thing of the past but that’s not because the B-52 is going anywhere. A request for proposal will be issued in March to re-engine 76 of the venerable bombers as part of the Air Force’s long-range bombing strategy through […]

A British man’s quietly persistent tribute to an American B-17 bomber crew he believes sacrificed their lives for him became a national tribute last week, complete with a major flypast of U.S. Air Force hardware. Tony Foulds, then eight years old, and his friends were playing in a field near Sheffield when the bomber appeared […]

The crew of the R/V Petrel research vessel announced that they have located the wreck of the USS Hornet, a World War II aircraft carrier that sunk in October 1942 during the Battle of Santa Cruz Island. As shown in the video below, the wreck was discovered in late January nearly 17,700 feet below the […]

United States Air Force F-16 Viper Demonstration Team commander Capt. Zoe Kotnik was removed from command on Monday after only two weeks in the position. Kotnik, who took command of the team on Jan. 29, 2019, is the Air Force’s first female single-ship tactical demonstration pilot and was the team’s first female commander. Her first […]

I was flying south over a water route just off the East Coast nearing Washington, D.C., when a Baron called ATC and this was the exchange. Baron: “Washington Center, what were those aircraft that just went by me? It was a group of some kind of fighters.” Center: “Oh, those. Yes, that was a flight […]

The Marine Corps version of the F-35 might only last 25 percent of its presumed life expectancy according to a Pentagon report obtained by Bloomberg. The news service is reporting the short takeoff-vertical landing F-35B may only last 2,100 hours instead of the projected life limit of 8,000 hours. At a unit cost of about […]