Watch: America’s fastest fighters take on the the Mach Loop in low flying passes

Although advanced fifth-generation platforms like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-22 Raptor tend to dominate the headlines, workhorse fourth-generation fighters like the F/A-18 Super Hornet and F-15 Eagle remain the backbone of America’s air dominance around the globe. Despite being in operation for better than forty years, the F-15’s incredible thrust to weight ratio […]

What do we mean when we say ‘fifth-generation’ fighter?

When it comes to fighter jets, the modern world is currently amid a transition. The combat-proven fighters we’ve grown to know and love over the years are reaching the ends of their operational lifespans, and while update programs are underway for many of them, technological strides made in the years since these platforms first took […]

What do we do with our stealth aircraft after we’re through with them?

In 2008, the Pentagon sent the first operational stealth combat jet, the F-117A Nighthawk, out to pasture — or at least, sort of. The F-117 flew as an entirely classified program for years before ever being acknowledged by the U.S. Air Force as an operational program in the 1980s, allowing a generation of young Americans […]

Five US military aircraft already being developed for future wars

The United States has spent years touting the Lockheed Martin sourced F-35 as the most advanced combat aircraft ever devised — which resulted in some ruffled feathers when Lockheed pitched an F-35/F-22 hybrid fighter it claimed would be superior to the incredibly expensive (and perpetually troubled) F-35 program. The thing is, despite being chock-full of […]

Lockheed Martin awarded $928 million to help US catch up in hypersonic missile race

Every so often, a new kind of weapon comes along that fundamentally shifts the way humans conduct warfare: bows extended the range of the battlefield, airplanes created air support, and the atomic bomb made “total war” too terrible to conduct with the regularity of conventional warfare. Increasingly, hypersonic missile platforms are beginning to look like […]