Fokker F28: Canada Scrapped 12, Three Escaped the Shredder
Fifteen jet airliners sat on the apron at Saskatoon for close to two decades, going quietly to pieces in Saskatchewan winters. They were Fokker F28 Fellowships, and they had once belonged to Canadian Regional Airlines. As of this week they are gone. aeroTELEGRAPH...
KC-46A Exports: America Just Tripled Its Tanker Sales Ceiling
The US Air Force has just raised the spending ceiling on its Boeing KC-46A export contract from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. No aircraft were ordered. No money changed hands. It is, on paper, one of the least dramatic $13.4 billion announcements you will ever read....
Japan CH-47s: The JSDF’s First Overseas Firefighting Mission
A Japanese landing ship arrived in West Kalimantan this week with three CH-47 Chinooks and around 300 people on board. According to the Associated Press, it is the first known overseas firefighting operation the Japan Self-Defense Forces have ever conducted. For a...
Ukraine’s Next Fighter Pilots Are Training on L-39s in Canada
There is a pleasing symmetry in the pictures the Ukrainian presidential office released on Saturday. Twenty-one Ukrainian military pilots are in Canada learning to fly Western fighters. The aircraft they are learning on is a Czechoslovak jet trainer designed in the...
Akinci UAV-300: A Drone Just Fired a Ballistic Missile
A propeller-driven drone took off from a test centre in Tekirdag on Friday, flew out over the Black Sea, and put a ballistic missile through a ship more than 250 kilometres away. Then it turned round and flew home along its planned route. That is not how ballistic...
9/11 F-16s: Three Jets That Defended Washington Are Saved
On the morning of 11 September 2001, four pilots of the District of Columbia Air National Guard ran to their F-16s at Andrews without waiting for live weapons to be loaded. One of them, Lt. Heather Penney, had never scrambled an aircraft before. She had never even...
Swiss F-35: The US Non-Paper That Savic Never Passed On
Shortly before Christmas 2024, a document arrived at the Swiss Federal Department of Defence (VBS) from Washington. It was a non-paper — the diplomatic instrument governments use to float a position without formally committing to it. Its message was simple: the...
Seat 11A, Jeans and Brace Position: Three Cabin Safety Myths
On 12 June 2025, an Air India Boeing 787-8 came down within a minute of leaving Ahmedabad. Of the 242 people on board, one walked away: Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, who had been sitting in seat 11A. People on the ground were killed too....
Mayday, Pan-Pan and Squawk 7700: What Pilots Say on the Radio
A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops transmitting. Nobody...
Northrop X-21A: The Plane With 800,000 Slots in Its Wings
Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax directly, with an...
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