Meiringen F-35 Noise Test Slips a Year Over a Missing Net
The people of the Haslital have been asking a reasonable question since 2022: what will an F-35 actually sound like when it takes off from the valley they live in? The Swiss Air Force and armasuisse agreed to answer it the sensible way, by flying an F/A-18 and an F-35...
Tarom’s First 737 MAX Arrives as Its Rescue Plan Slips
At 18:51 on the evening of 8 September, a Boeing 737-8 registered YR-BGO touched down at Henri Coandă in Bucharest, having flown in directly from the United States. It is the first 737 MAX Tarom has ever operated, and the first in Romania. Boeing, Tarom and the lessor...
Tu-95 at Engels-2: A Second Bomber Russia Cannot Replace
Russia stopped building the Tupolev Tu-95 in 1992 and scrapped the tooling three years later. That single fact is what makes the satellite imagery coming out of Engels-2 worth paying attention to. On the night of Friday 28 August, Ukraine’s SBU struck the strategic...
Rafale F5: France Orders the First Contracts After FCAS Died
For most of a decade, France told itself a story about the 2040s in which the Rafale was a bridge to something else. That something else was FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System, and in June it broke apart. Which leaves Dassault with an aircraft...
Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily
Swiss crews meet GPS spoofing every day. Switzerland is nonetheless switching its airports away from the ground-based landing system that spoofing cannot touch, and doing it to save money. That plan has just started to unravel. The Tages-Anzeiger reported today that...
Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
In 1968, for two months, Eastern Air Lines flew fare-paying passengers between cities in the north-eastern United States in a French military transport with four propellers all driven by the same shaft. The following year American Airlines tried the same aircraft, and...
Bell XV-15: The Tiltrotor That Bowed to the Crowd
At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a publication given to...
Ukraine’s Next Fighter Pilots Are Training on L-39s in Canada
There is a pleasing symmetry in the pictures the Ukrainian presidential office released on Saturday. Twenty-one Ukrainian military pilots are in Canada learning to fly Western fighters. The aircraft they are learning on is a Czechoslovak jet trainer designed in the...
Sabena 548: The Crash That Erased a National Team
On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on board were killed,...
France Orders Eight Airbus U050 Capa-X Drones
The whole system fits on two pickup trucks. That sentence, buried in an Airbus press release, is the reason the French armed forces have just ordered eight of these aircraft. On 10 September 2026 France’s Aeronautical Maintenance Directorate placed a follow-on...
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