Airbus Broughton: The A380 Wing Hall Becomes an A321 Factory
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
NATS Prestwick Outage: Scotland’s Airspace Throttled Again
Share this story Thirteen days. That is how long British aviation got between one national air traffic control failure and the next. Early on Monday morning a connectivity fault hit the NATS centre at Prestwick, the facility that runs Scottish upper airspace and feeds...
CT-157 Siskin II: Canada Swaps Snowbird Jets for a Turboprop
Share this story At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the...
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
Share this story A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the...
Skytrax 2026: Singapore Airlines Takes a Sixth World’s Best
Share this story On Friday evening at the Langham Hotel in London, Singapore Airlines was named the World’s Best Airline for the sixth time in the history of the Skytrax World Airline Awards. Qatar Airways, last year’s winner and a nine-time holder of the...
Silver Wotan: Germany and Sweden Rehearse the Fight for Gotland
Share this story Gotland is a long, low slab of limestone sitting almost exactly in the middle of the Baltic Sea. It has a few tens of thousands of residents, a walled medieval town at Visby, and a strategic value out of all proportion to either. This week, Germany...
Germany’s First F-35A Handed Over at Fort Worth
Share this story We have watched this particular aeroplane twice already: once when it went into the paint shop in August, and again when it flew for the first time on 10 September. On Friday, Lockheed Martin rolled 35+01 out under the lights at Fort Worth and...
Finland’s First F-35s Land at Rovaniemi, Inside the Arctic Circle
Share this story At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this...
Italian Typhoon Hit at Ta’if: Houthi Strike Damages an F-2000
Share this story Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside...
Flygvapnet at 100: How Sweden Built Its Own Air Force
Share this story On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about,...
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