Thunderbird F-16 Crash: A Vane Nobody Could Inspect
Share this story The pilot described it as the jet just stopping in mid-air. On 3 December 2025 a Thunderbirds F-16 was flying loops and rolls over the California desert. The pilot, an instructor with nearly 1,400 hours, had peeled off from the delta formation during...
Australia Declares the Triton and the Peregrine Operational
Share this story Australia has a surveillance problem that is essentially arithmetic. The area it is expected to watch is vast, the number of aircraft it can afford is not, and the distances mean an aircraft spends much of its life transiting rather than looking. On...
Iran War Losses: The Pentagon and CBO Finally Publish the Numbers
Share this story For six months the accounting was guesswork, satellite imagery and leaks. Last week the United States government published its own figures, twice. On 14 September the Pentagon’s Lead Inspector General delivered its first quarterly report to Congress...
Europe’s Airlift Gap: EDA Weighs An-124 Refit or a New C-17
Share this story There are two aircraft in the world that can pick up something genuinely enormous and fly it a very long way. One is Ukrainian and first flew in 1982. The other is American and stopped being built in 2015. Europe owns almost none of either, and the...
RAF Voyager Deploys to Help Defend Saudi Airspace
Share this story It is one aeroplane. That is the first thing to say, because the numbers here are small and the meaning is not. On Tuesday the British Ministry of Defence announced that a single Royal Air Force Voyager tanker will deploy to help Saudi Arabia defend...
F-16 Crashes at Spangdahlem: Second US Falcon Lost in a Week
Share this story The golf course at Spangdahlem Air Base sits directly under the approach to Runway 04. On Tuesday afternoon it became a crash site. At roughly half past two local time, a F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the base resident 52nd Fighter Wing came down...
FAA Age Limits: Why Pilots Retire at 65 and Controllers Start by 31
Share this story Two of the most demanding jobs in aviation have hard age limits written into American law. One of them ends a career. The other one prevents a career from ever starting. An airline captain who is flying a perfect line check on the morning of their...
How Fighter Pilots Pee: Piddle Packs, AIRUS and Tactical Dehydration
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
F-35 Parts Diverted to Hong Kong: Australia Confirms the Shipment
Share this story A crate of broken fighter parts is the least glamorous object in military aviation. Nobody guards it the way they guard a jet. It goes in a container, on a commercial aircraft, and turns up at a repair shop on the other side of the world. That is how...
Canadian Army Aviation: Artillery Officers in Air Force Squadrons
Share this story The Directorate of History and Heritage keeps Canada’s official squadron lineages, and its entry for 664 Squadron opens with five words that contain an entire institutional quarrel: “This Canadian Army squadron was authorized”. 664...
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