SWISS A350: The Third Jet Lands, Seven Still to Come
Swiss has a third Airbus A350. According to aeroTELEGRAPH, HB-IFC arrived in Zurich on 12 September, joining the two A350-900s already in the fleet and continuing the slowest, most consequential fleet change the airline has made in twenty years. Three aircraft out of...
Japan CH-47s: The JSDF’s First Overseas Firefighting Mission
A Japanese landing ship arrived in West Kalimantan this week with three CH-47 Chinooks and around 300 people on board. According to the Associated Press, it is the first known overseas firefighting operation the Japan Self-Defense Forces have ever conducted. For a...
Mayday, Pan-Pan and Squawk 7700: What Pilots Say on the Radio
A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops transmitting. Nobody...
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...
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...
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...
REGENT Viceroy: The Electric Seaglider That Flies as a Boat
On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water. Two people were on board. Neither of them was...
HT-100 NAVAL: Angola Gets Six Swiss-Built Robot Helicopters
In the last week of August, in a village in the Swiss canton of Glarus, a small grey helicopter with no one inside it lifted off, flew a profile, and landed again. It did this five more times, in six different airframes. Painted on the side of each one, under a naval...
Boeing 747 G-ONEE: An Open Door in the Rain Cost All Airspeed
Nothing about the night looked like the start of an emergency. On the ramp at London Heathrow, a One Air Boeing 747 freighter sat with its left forward passenger door — the L1 door — standing open, because the engineers changing its smoke detectors were...
UMPK Glide Bombs: Russia Dropped a Reported 8,766 in August
Somewhere over the Luhansk region, a Russian Su-34 Fullback pulls into a shallow climb at around 12,000 metres, holds it for a few seconds, and lets go of four objects that look like ordinary bombs wearing borrowed wings. The aircraft never crosses the front line. It...
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