Henschel Hs 129: The Cockpit So Tight the Dials Went Outside
Share this story There is a simple test for how badly an aircraft designer has run out of room. Look at where the instruments ended up. On the Henschel Hs 129, some of the engine gauges were bolted to the inside faces of the engine nacelles, out in the slipstream,...
Ta 183 Huckebein: Did It Really Become the MiG-15?
Share this story Search for the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 Huckebein and you will find the same sentence over and over: this was the aircraft that became the MiG-15. The swept wing, the nose intake, the tail carried high on the fin — the Soviets took the drawings home in...
F-14 vs RF-4C: The Tomcat That Shot Down an American Phantom
Share this story The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it. On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy...
Two A380s, Two Fates: One Flies the Open Fan, One Is Scrapped
Share this story Two Airbus A380s are sitting on the Airbus books with Guernsey registrations, both bought back from Malaysia Airlines, both identical when they rolled out of Toulouse. One of them is about to carry the most radical jet engine anyone has proposed in...
Condor Goes Private: Attestor Buys Out the German State
Share this story Six years ago Condor was a German holiday airline whose parent had just collapsed, kept alive by a state bridging loan while everyone worked out what to do with it. On 25 September 2026 the German state announced it is getting out entirely. Attestor,...
Rafale for Portugal: Dassault Signs a Deal With Portuguese Industry
Share this story There is a scale model of a Rafale on the table between the two men signing. It is a small detail and it is the entire point: the document being signed is not a contract for aircraft. It is a promise about Portuguese factories. On 23 September 2026,...
RAF Space Effects Squadron: Britain Forms a Unit to Fight in Orbit
Share this story The Royal Air Force has formed a squadron whose base it will not name, whose size it will not give, and whose readiness date it will not state. What it will say is what the unit is for: disrupting, degrading and denying an adversary’s activity...
Su-57 Deliveries: Russia Hands Over Its Second Batch of 2026
Share this story On 24 September 2026, United Aircraft Corporation announced on its Telegram channel that it had handed a batch of new Su-57 fighters to the Russian Aerospace Forces. It did not say how many. That omission is the story. Russia has been building its...
Airbus A321neo Corrosion Defect Hits More Than 500 Jets
Share this story Somewhere in the second tier of Airbus’s supply chain, a coating was applied too thinly. Not on a wing spar, not on an engine mount — on stringers, the unglamorous aluminium stiffeners that run the length of a fuselage and hold its skin in...
Solca Drone Crash: Romanian F-16s and Spanish Hornets Scramble
Share this story It was over in four minutes. By the time two Romanian F-16s were airborne from Borcea and a helicopter was lifting out of Bacău, the thing they had been sent to find was already down in a forest outside a town of three thousand people, and...
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