“The first serious clashes of the 1952 took place on 6 January. A number of engagements took place between through the day, after which F-86 pilots claimed to have shot down five MiG-15s and Soviet MiG-15 pilots claimed to have shot down nine F-86s.”

“We didn’t know a great deal about the single-seat A-10 (as we’d all been banking on the sleek and sophisticated Eagle and there was no Google available for us to conduct in-depth research), but there’s one thing we knew for sure: the A-10 – and there’s really no other way to put this – was Butt Ugly.”

Two hundred feet above the scorched Nevada desert at 350 knots is unlikely to have been a flight regime envisaged by Avro test pilot Roly Falk when he took the Model 698 on her maiden flight a quarter of a century earlier.

I have always wanted to fly an aircraft so new that the sticky price tag was still on it; when that price tag is attached to an F-16, the experience is well worth the effort. 

"All at once the growl is replaced by a ferocious barking.  I feel as if I’m holding back an angry Rottweiler"

"Well, that’s how it’s supposed to work when you put a couple of $30 million Tomcats against a couple of $5 million Tigers."

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Royal Air Force's participation at Exercise RED FLAG, hosted since 1975 by the US Air Force at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

I was mindful that the locals might not be too friendly where we were about to land. 

We had already been rocketed twice today. The first attack had been at 3 a.m. at Basra, the attack siren waking us out of bed to lie on the dusty floor.

I was alarmed and called on the radio - ‘Dude, are you getting shot at?’  ‘No’.  ‘Well you’re flaring.  Quit it!’