Switzerland’s First F-35 Takes Shape in Italy
Share this story Switzerland’s first F-35A Lightning II is no longer a set of drawings and contracts. It is now metal. In a hall at Cameri, in the Italian region of Piedmont, the first fuselage section of a Swiss jet has been mated to its first wing — the...
How Many Aircraft Are There in the World?
Share this story Ask most people to picture “the world’s aircraft” and they imagine airliners — rows of jets at a busy airport. Yet airliners are a tiny slice of the real total. Add up everything with wings and an engine, from a two-seat trainer at a...
Two Close Calls in Two Days at Munich
Share this story Munich Airport has had a nervous week. On the evening of 17 August 2026, a Lufthansa Airbus A380 arriving from San Francisco touched down short of its runway and ploughed through the approach lighting at the threshold. All 351 people on board were...
The Friendly Jet Trainer That Went to War
Share this story Most fast jets seat their crew one behind the other, the passenger staring at the back of the pilot’s helmet. The BAC Jet Provost and its armed cousin, the BAC Strikemaster, do it differently. In these aircraft you sit shoulder to shoulder with...
The Piston Plane That Outlived Its Replacement
Share this story In the summer of 1991, the Royal Air Force flew supersonic Tornados, was preparing for the Eurofighter, and had just watched stealth aircraft debut over Iraq. And the aircraft it relied on to spot incoming threats and guard the northern approaches to...
The Spy Plane With One Black Wing
Share this story Here is a strange way to predict a North Korean missile test. Open a flight-tracking website, and watch for a single, ageing American jet to take off from Nebraska, cross the Pacific, and start flying long racetrack patterns over the Yellow Sea. When...
Germany’s Radar Wall Against the Night Bombers
Share this story On a moonless night in 1942, an RAF bomber crossing the Dutch coast flew into a wall it could not see. There was no barrier in the sky — only an invisible grid of radar beams, searchlights and waiting fighters, each box of it engineered to catch one...
An Old Mirage Learns a New Emirati Trick
Share this story The Mirage 2000 first flew in 1978. The precision bomb now hanging under the United Arab Emirates’ version of it was designed in Abu Dhabi in the 2020s. That gap — a Cold War delta wing carrying a home-grown 21st-century weapon — is the whole...
1,000 More Horses for the Black Hawk
Share this story It is not often that an aircraft gets fifty percent more power without getting any bigger. That is exactly what the U.S. Army is trying to bolt into thousands of its helicopters — and on 12 August 2026 the effort passed one of its hardest gates. GE...
Finland’s Hornets Begin Their Final Countdown
Share this story For thirty years, the sound of Finland’s air defence has been the twin-engine howl of the F/A-18 Hornet. Now the clock on that sound has started ticking down. As Finland’s first F-35A Lightning II stealth fighters move through training in...
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