Share this story There is a company on the New York Stock Exchange today whose name is a peace treaty between two men who spent a decade trying to destroy each other in court. Orville and Wilbur Wright patented powered flight. Glenn Curtiss started building aeroplanes...
Share this story It sat on the ground at twenty-two degrees nose-up, which meant the pilot could not see forward at all. To take off and land he looked down through windows cut into the floor at his feet. The Vought V-173 was a flat disc with two enormous propellers...
Share this story The Germans had radar too. Theirs was arguably better — Freya operated on a shorter wavelength, used a smaller steerable antenna, and gave sharper resolution than anything the British had strung along their coastline. It did the Luftwaffe no good...
Share this story Walk the halls at Farnborough this week and you will trip over robot aeroplanes. Anduril unveiled a tiltrotor on Monday morning. BAE and Lockheed unveiled a jammer an hour or two later. Boeing parked an Australian one on the static line. General...
Share this story Most combat aircraft announced at airshows are defined by what they carry. Israel Aerospace Industries spent Monday introducing one defined by what it broadcasts. ELLYON has no bomb bay and no missile rails. Its weapon is a wideband electronically...
Share this story The first big order of Farnborough 2026 landed before most of the stands had finished setting up. Riyadh Air, the Saudi carrier that flew its first paying passenger barely three weeks ago, spent Monday morning committing to 34 more widebody aircraft...
Share this story The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a...
Share this story From the air it looks like a filing system for aeroplanes. Row upon row of them, wingtip to wingtip, laid out across ten square kilometres of Arizona desert in lines so straight they look drawn. Bombers here. Fighters there. Transports over there....
Share this story Earlier this year the RAF’s first E-7 Wedgetail spent a period at a Wiltshire airfield most people have never heard of, having its systems activated and its radar calibrated, before it was allowed anywhere near an operational squadron. That is...
Share this story Last week the Royal Air Force’s second E-7 Wedgetail flew out of Birmingham looking like somebody had forgotten to finish it. No roundels, no squadron markings, no grey. Just an unlovely metallic green from nose to tail. Almost every aircraft...
Share this story Every bomb ever built before 1944 was designed to hit the thing it was aimed at. Barnes Wallis built two that were designed to land next to it. This was not a compromise or an admission that bombing was inaccurate. It was the entire principle. Wallis...
Share this story Everything a combat pilot knows about dropping a bomb assumes air. Thick air, at sensible altitudes, where wings generate predictable lift, engines produce rated thrust, and a weapon released at a known speed follows a known arc to the ground. In May...
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