Namsi 1951: Black Tuesday and the End of the B-29
Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the far side of a...
Catalina Affair: The Shootdown Sweden Denied for 40 Years
The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the sea east of...
Star Alliance Builds Only Its Seventh Own Lounge, at Incheon
Star Alliance has 25-odd member airlines and access to more than a thousand airport lounges around the world. It owns six of them. Six, in twenty-nine years: Los Angeles, Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Buenos Aires Ezeiza, Rio de Janeiro Galeão,...
Italy Orders Two MQ-9A Reapers Built for Nobody
Somewhere in San Diego there were two MQ-9A Reapers that nobody had bought. They are Italian now. A note on the pictures: no photograph of an Italian Air Force MQ-9 is available under a licence we can use, so the aircraft shown here are US Air Force Reapers of the...
Boeing Offers the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to Japan
Japan is 6,800 islands long. Defending that coastline with crewed fighters means either an air force it cannot afford or gaps it cannot accept. Which is why Tokyo is now designing a coastal defence concept built around uncrewed aircraft — and why every large...
Riyadh Air Opens Manila: A Labour Corridor With an Airline
At 15:55 this afternoon, a Boeing 787-9 in a deep indigo livery touched down at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and an hour and a half later it went back the way it came. Flight RX0873 from Riyadh, inbound. RX0874 to Riyadh, outbound. Every day from now on. Riyadh...
RNZAF NH90: The World’s First to 3,000 Flight Hours
The NH90 has one of the worst reputations in modern military aviation. Australia binned its 46 of them a decade early. Norway walked away. Sweden is phasing its out by 2027. Belgium and Finland are not fans. The type has become shorthand for a European procurement...
PACAF Wants 60 DroneBusters and Has No Money Yet
It looks like a rifle, weighs less than five pounds, and you can teach somebody to work it in under five minutes. Pacific Air Forces wants sixty of them. It does not, at present, have the money to pay for them. On 8 September 2026, PACAF’s 18th Contracting...
Bahrain International Airshow Slips Two Years to 2028
In November 2024, the United States sent two B-52H bombers to fly over the Bahrain International Airshow. One of them then parked on the static display, the first time a B-52 had done so at Sakhir. Nobody pretended it was a routine appearance. It was a message to...
TASACK: Poland’s Point-and-Click Loitering Munition
The problem with the FPV attack drone — the weapon that has defined three years of fighting in Ukraine — is that it needs a pilot. Not a technician, a pilot: somebody who can fly a fast, twitchy quadcopter into a moving target through a laggy video feed,...
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