Barnes F-35A: The 104th Fighter Wing Ends 18 Years of Eagles
In October 2025, three F-15 Eagles took off from Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, Massachusetts, and did not come back. That was the end of eighteen years of Eagle operations by the 104th Fighter Wing. One of the pilots in that final three-ship was Capt....
Cessna SkyCourier UX: Textron Takes the Pilots Out of the Freighter
Most of the autonomy on display at National Harbor this week was fighter-shaped. Stealthy wings, missile bays, names like Vengeance and Fury. Textron brought a box. Specifically, it brought the Cessna SkyCourier UX: a certified, in-service, thoroughly unglamorous twin...
Operation Thursday: The Night Gliders Landed in Burma
At half past four on the afternoon of 5 March 1944, a photographic officer landed at Lalaghat in Assam with a three-foot-square print under his arm and ninety minutes to spare. Captain Charles Russhon had flown over Burma that morning in a B-25 without telling the man...
KG 200: The Luftwaffe Squadron That Flew Captured B-17s
Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations apart from the...
Swiss F-35: Parliament Approves 394 Million Francs More
In September 2020 Swiss voters approved a new fighter fleet by 8,515 votes out of more than three million cast. It was the narrowest margin in modern Swiss defence politics, and the case for it rested heavily on one reassuring word: the price was fixed. On Tuesday...
Aeroflot VP-BOE: 1,650 Days Parked at Geneva, CHF 1.6 Million
The aeroplane was ready to go. Fully fuelled, passengers in their seats, catering loaded, doors about to close. It was a Sunday afternoon in Geneva and the Aeroflot A321 had landed from Moscow only a couple of hours earlier. Then the European Union closed its airspace...
Citation Latitude TC-AKF: A Nearly New Jet Burns at Misrata
The aeroplane was a few months old. It was empty except for the three people flying it, on a short hop across the Mediterranean to collect passengers in Libya. It was a routine positioning flight, the kind that happens a thousand times a morning across the business...
863 Drones in 24 Hours: Russia Attacked Under the Cloud
Air defence against a Shahed-type drone is, more often than not, a human being looking up. The aircraft is small, slow, made largely of composite and plywood, and flies low enough to disappear into ground clutter. Radar helps. Thermal sights help. But at the sharp end...
A Russian Frigate Fired Flares at a Danish Helicopter
A Royal Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter was photographing a Russian frigate over the Baltic on Monday evening when the frigate fired two flares at it. One passed close to the aircraft. Nobody was hurt and the helicopter was undamaged. It was flying in international...
The Indian Air Force Flew a Helicopter Dressed as an Elephant
Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air Force. A tailor had...
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