Operation Yellow Ribbon: The Day Gander Took 6,600 Strangers
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
Varna: A Bus Hit a TUI fly Belgium 737 MAX Wing
Share this story Nearly everyone was aboard. A hundred and eighty-eight people were flying home to Brussels from the Bulgarian coast, boarding was almost finished, and the last busload of passengers was being driven out to the aircraft. The bus touched the wing. Not...
B-21 Raider: Whiteman Gets a $74.8M Signature-Test Hangar
Share this story You can learn a surprising amount about a secret aeroplane from the buildings people put up for it. On 10 September 2026, the US Army Corps of Engineers awarded Conti Federal Services a $74.8 million contract to build a radio frequency and...
Saab Takes SEK 2.9 Billion to Design Sweden’s Next Fighter
Share this story Sweden has roughly ten million people and builds its own fighter aircraft. It has done so, without interruption, since the 1940s. That is a peculiar and slightly improbable national habit, and on 9 September 2026 Stockholm quietly paid to keep it...
Air Force One: A Slide Inflated Before Trump Could Board
Share this story Every airline maintenance manager on earth felt a small twinge of recognition on Tuesday afternoon. An emergency escape slide inflated on the ground, with nobody evacuating, because somebody moved a door handle in the wrong sequence. It is one of the...
USAF Awards $149M for Bunker Buster Warhead Cases
Share this story The most expensive part of the biggest conventional bomb in the American inventory is not the explosive. It is the pipe it lives in. On 10 September 2026 the US Air Force awarded a combined $149 million to four companies to keep making those pipes:...
Hermeus Ramjet-X: A Ramjet Dropped From a Drone at Mach 3
Share this story A ramjet has no moving parts and no way of starting itself. It works by ramming air into a duct so fast that the compression alone is enough to burn fuel usefully, which means that at zero knots on a runway it is an expensively shaped tube of nothing....
NATS Outage: 2,000 UK Flights Cancelled, and a One-Week Deadline
Share this story 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...
Netherlands Signs for One Saab GlobalEye, Shared With Sweden
Share this story 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...
Novy Urengoy: Ukraine’s Deepest Drone Strike of the War
Share this story 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,...
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