Space Weapons in Orbit: ETH Warning and Switzerland’s Role
Share this story Ten days ago the Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, told a conference hall at National Harbor that the Space Force has on-orbit space control weapons. It was the first time a Pentagon official had said it plainly, and he confirmed afterwards that...
Why Carrier Jets Fold Their Wings, and What It Costs Them
Share this story A US Navy photograph from 1942 shows seven F4F Wildcats parked on grass. Two have their wings spread. Five have them folded back along the fuselage, and those five occupy roughly the same frontage as the two. That photograph is the entire argument for...
Rafale Flies With AI: Dassault Tests Two Cockpit Algorithms
Share this story Dassault Aviation said on Monday that it has flown a Rafale carrying two new artificial intelligence systems, both designed to help the person in the cockpit rather than replace them. One was written in-house by Dassault’s own engineers. The...
Mi-8 Over Braniewo: 42 Seconds Inside Polish Airspace
Share this story Three hundred metres. Forty-two seconds. On a map of Europe it would not register as a line. At 11:08 on Wednesday morning, a Russian Mi-8 helicopter flying out of Kaliningrad crossed the border north of the Polish town of Braniewo, stayed inside...
Berlin Brandenburg Drone Shutdown: 28 Sightings and Counting
Share this story At eight o’clock on Wednesday evening, somebody at Berlin Brandenburg Airport looked up and saw a drone over the northern runway. Twenty minutes later German air traffic control closed the airspace. Arrivals were sent to Dresden and Leipzig,...
Pilot Retirement Age by Country: China Stops at 63, Japan at 67
Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Iberia’s DC-4 to Buenos Aires: 36 Hours and Three Stops in 1946
Share this story On 22 September 1946 a four-engined Douglas DC-4 lifted off from Madrid and turned south. Thirty-six hours, three stops and one unscheduled diversion later it landed at Morón in Buenos Aires. Iberia had just become the first European airline to...
The Charter Business Built on Soviet Freighters
Share this story For twenty years, the way NATO moved something too big for its own aeroplanes was to ring a Ukrainian company and a Russian one. That sentence has aged badly, and the arrangement behind it is one of the stranger things the post-Cold-War world...
Why Nothing Can Replace the Antonov An-124
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Danish F-35s Land in Greenland for the First Time
Share this story There is a photograph from Kangerlussuaq on 16 September that does more work than any communiqué. Two Danish F-35As, four American F-16s and two Canadian CF-18s, parked together on a single strip of asphalt at the head of a Greenland fjord. The Royal...
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