NATS Outage: 2,000 UK Flights Cancelled, and a One-Week Deadline
Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled flights, a week-long...
Netherlands Signs for One Saab GlobalEye, Shared With Sweden
The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab announced that...
Novy Urengoy: Ukraine’s Deepest Drone Strike of the War
Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation, and until...
United Airlines Cancels Its Denver 9/11 Flyover
The plan was to take off at 8:15 in the morning, roughly the minute United 175 left Boston Logan, and to be over United’s Flight Training Center at 9:03, the exact minute that aircraft struck the South Tower. A Boeing 777 in United colours, escorted by four F-16...
Germany’s First F-35A: 35+01 Flies at Fort Worth
Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code 35+01. Lockheed...
Muwaffaq Salti: Iran Damaged a US A-10 and Eight F-15Es
For seven months of this war, the pattern at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has been the same. Iran fires. Patriots answer. Jordan and CENTCOM announce that the interception rate was high, the base is operational, and everyone is fine. Tehran claims devastation. Nobody...
Minimum Interval Takeoff: B-52s Twelve Seconds Apart
The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings level, still low....
Brian Shul: The Burned Pilot Who Flew the Blackbird
On 20 May 2023, in a hotel ballroom in Reno, a 75-year-old man finished telling a story he had told several hundred times, stepped away from the lectern, and collapsed. There were doctors in the audience. He died at the hospital that night. Brian Shul had spent thirty...
Swiss F-35: Could Viola Amherd Be Personally Liable?
The question being asked in Bern this afternoon is not whether the F-35 procurement went wrong. That is settled. It is whether anyone will personally pay for it. A day after the oversight committee reported that Switzerland never had a fixed price for its F-35As, the...
Marga von Etzdorf: The First Woman to Fly for an Airline
On 19 February 1928, a 20-year-old German woman climbed into the cockpit of a Junkers F.13 named Kiek in die Welt — Berlin dialect for “look in the world” — and flew it for Lufthansa. She is generally credited as the first woman anywhere hired...
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