A bomber this big should not accelerate like this.
The Tu-160 “White Swan” is powered by four Kuznetsov NK-32 engines, each capable of roughly 25,000 kgf of afterburning thrust. Together, that is about 100,000 kgf of thrust driving a bomber weighing hundreds of tonnes down the runway.
That power is what gives the Tu-160 its unusual combination of enormous size, long-range strike capability and supersonic performance. Russia operates it as a strategic missile carrier within its Long-Range Aviation force, designed to launch long-range cruise missiles from well outside the target area.
And this takeoff shows exactly why the NK-32 is such a defining part of the aircraft: when all four afterburners light, the heat distortion alone makes the air behind the bomber visibly ripple.
What stands out more: the sheer engine power or the size of the Tu-160? ✈️
A French military source told Le Monde that France is already carrying out undisclosed conventional military responses to Russian hybrid attacks. Asked whether Paris could retaliate militarily without making it public, the source replied: “That is already happening.”
10/10 parenting. I will die on the hill that supporting young adults and staying right there with them as they climb into adulthood is one of the most important things you will ever, ever do as a parent.
These used to be the kind of scenes you saw in videos from Putin's Russia, now shockingly regular in Western democracies - all, bizarrely, to punish criticism of a random country in the Middle East.
Alan Ritchson reveals that the storyline where he kills the white supremacist militia in 'REACHER' almost happened.
“Fun fact: I had it approved until someone got re-elected.”
Source: Alan Ritchson on Threads
BREAKING: The US "almost started a war" against China, nearly launching an operation against a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring, in the midst of the Iran war, after an AI-generated intelligence report falsely identified the vessel as carrying nuclear weapons components, with armed US personnel preparing to board and military aircraft already in the air before officials found the report had been produced with a chatbot, per CNN.
A special operations command analyst had used a chatbot to fuse open-source material with classified signals intelligence, then used AI again to package the result into a standard intelligence report and circulated it across the US military.