


Ted Swartz: The US Navy Skyhawk Pilot Who Downed a MiG-17
Share this story The A-4 Skyhawk was built to bomb things. It was small, light and nimble, and in Vietnam it hauled bombs and rockets into some of the most heavily defended airspace in history. Shooting down enemy fighters was the job of the Crusaders and Phantoms...
Operation Tagar and Dugman 5: Israel’s Worst Day Against the SAMs
Share this story On the morning of 7 October 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force set out to do the thing it had been planning for years. It would destroy the Egyptian surface-to-air missile belt along the Suez Canal, and with it the...
Kazakhstan’s Second Airbus A400M Rolls Out in Gloss Grey
Share this story Kazakhstan’s second Airbus A400M has its paint on. Airbus released photographs on 1 October of the airlifter at its final assembly line in Seville, Spain, finished in a glossy grey scheme with “Kazakhstan Air Force” on the forward...
KLM’s First Airbus A350 Lands: PH-ZNA “De Nachtwacht”
Share this story KLM’s long-haul future touched down at Schiphol on Friday afternoon, 2 October. Airbus A350-900 PH-ZNA, named “De Nachtwacht” after Rembrandt’s Night Watch, landed in Amsterdam after a delivery flight from Toulouse, the first...
SRC Ghost Mantis Picked for USAF Large Aircraft Missile Warning
Share this story Tankers, airlifters and airborne radar aircraft are big, slow and impossible to hide. They are also, increasingly, the targets that very-long-range air-to-air missiles are built to kill. On 1 October the US Air Force moved to give them a better chance...
Golden Arrows at 75: No. 17 Squadron, From MiG-21 to Rafale
Share this story Seventy-five years ago, on 1 October 1951, the Indian Air Force formed a new squadron equipped with Harvard trainers. Today No. 17 Squadron, the Golden Arrows, flies the Rafale out of Ambala, and on 1 October 2026 it celebrated its platinum jubilee...
Boeing SPEEA Contract Ratified: Engineer Strike Averted
Share this story Boeing can breathe out. On 1 October, members of SPEEA, the union that represents the company’s engineers and technical workers, voted to accept new four-year contracts, ending the threat of a strike that could have begun the following week. It...
KAAN P1 First Flight: Turkey’s Stealth Fighter Weeks Away
Share this story Turkey’s stealth fighter is about to fly again, this time in the form it is meant to be built in. Speaking at the TEKNOFEST Southeast technology festival on 2 October, Turkish Aerospace (TUSAŞ) general manager Mehmet Demiroğlu said all system...
NTSB: Miami Tower Never Gave the Amazon 767 Crew the Wind
Share this story The tower told the Amazon jet it was cleared to land. It did not tell the crew what the wind was doing. Four minutes earlier, on another frequency, controllers had passed the gusts to someone else. That is one of the central findings in the National...
114 Rafale Deal: India Expects a Decision by Year-End
Share this story India’s biggest fighter deal in a generation has a deadline. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh said on 1 October that the bids for 114 more Dassault Rafale jets for the Indian Air Force are being evaluated, and that New Delhi expects to reach...
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