Inkspot 59: The B-47 That Vanished With Two Nuclear Cores
On 10 March 1956 a six-engined American bomber descended through a solid deck of cloud over the Mediterranean to meet a tanker. It never arrived. No wreckage was found. No bodies were found. And neither were the two containers of nuclear weapon material it was...
Turbulent Turtle: The First Shootdown of the Cold War
At 10:31 Greenwich time on 8 April 1950, a United States Navy Privateer lifted off from Wiesbaden and turned for the Baltic. Ten men were aboard. None of them came back, and no trace of any of them has ever been found. The aircraft was called Turbulent Turtle. Nobody...
The Afghan Air Force Five Years After the Taliban
Five years after the Taliban walked into Kabul, one of the odder questions in military aviation is still unanswered: what is actually left of the air force the United States spent two decades and billions of dollars building? The honest answer is that nobody outside...
Korean Air Switches On Free Starlink Wi-Fi on 15 September
Korean Air will switch on free Starlink Wi-Fi on 15 September 2026, and in doing so becomes the first full-service airline in East Asia to put SpaceX’s low-Earth-orbit network into its cabins. It starts small: four aircraft. It is meant to finish large: most of...
Hüfifirn: A Swiss Glacier Gives Back a Plane Lost in 1963
A walker in the Swiss canton of Uri came across something metallic lying on the ice near the Hüfifirn glacier and called the police. The police called the accident investigators. The investigators confirmed it was light alloy from an aircraft. Then came the part...
USAF Seeks Medium-Caliber Guns to Defend Its Air Bases
For thirty years the United States Air Force has fought wars in which nothing much threatened its airfields. Aircraft were parked in neat rows in the open because nobody could reach them. That assumption is gone. And the Air Force’s response is to go looking for...
Viper Shield: The F-16’s Digital Armour Enters Production
The F-16 Fighting Falcon first flew in 1974. More than fifty years later, eight countries have collectively put around a billion dollars into making sure it can still survive a modern air defence network — and almost none of that money has gone into the...
Algeria Closes Its Airspace to UAE Aircraft
At midnight on 11 September 2026, Algeria closed its airspace to every civilian and military aircraft registered in the United Arab Emirates. It is the kind of announcement that sounds enormous and, in commercial terms, changes almost nothing. The UAE carrier that...
France Orders Eight Airbus U050 Capa-X Drones
The whole system fits on two pickup trucks. That sentence, buried in an Airbus press release, is the reason the French armed forces have just ordered eight of these aircraft. On 10 September 2026 France’s Aeronautical Maintenance Directorate placed a follow-on...
Vietravel Airlines Signs a Letter of Intent for 50 Airbus Jets
Vietravel Airlines has been building its own fleet for about fifteen months. It owns a small handful of Airbus A321s. Its international network consists of two routes. On 10 September 2026, in the Salon at the Élysée Palace and in front of the French...
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