Lufthansa Put a 1950s Design on a Modern Jet
Step onto a Lufthansa A321 at Frankfurt this year and you might find yourself aboard a flying time machine. One aircraft in the fleet, registration D-AISZ, wears a design no airline has flown in earnest for half a century: a deep blue cheatline trimmed in yellow that...
Denmark’s Famous Red F-16 Heads to Argentina
Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the star of...
Europe’s €100 Billion Fighter Just Died
On a grey June morning at the ILA Berlin air show, the most ambitious warplane Europe never built quietly ceased to exist. The Future Combat Air System — FCAS, or SCAF to the French — was meant to give France, Germany and Spain a sixth-generation fighter...
“Konkordski”: The Soviet Concorde That Flew First
On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov, has reportedly...
Canada Picks an Italian Jet to Train Its Pilots
When you buy a front-line fighter, you also have to solve a quieter problem: how to train the pilots who will fly it. On 16 June 2026, Canada took a major step toward an answer — and the jet it chose is Italian. On the sidelines of the G7 summit in France,...
France Fires Its New Missile at Supersonic Speed
High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things a weapon can be...
A Pilot Just Flew a Drone From Another Jet
Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other aircraft entirely,...
The Tiger Gets a New Set of Claws
The attack helicopter has spent the last few years being written off. Ukraine’s skies, thick with man-portable missiles and cheap drones, have looked like an unkind place for a low, slow gunship. Europe’s answer is not to retire its Tiger — but to rebuild it almost...
Europe Rolls Out Its Robot Wingmen
For years, the race to build “robot wingmen” — uncrewed jets that fight alongside human pilots — looked like an American and Australian story. In a single week in June, Europe planted its flag.At the ILA air show in Berlin, two very different European players pulled...
Turkey’s Radar-Killer Jet Steps Into View
It looks, at a glance, like a rich man’s toy: a sleek Bombardier business jet, the kind that ferries executives between capitals. Then you notice the lumps. A long blade running down its spine, blisters under the belly, a fairing crowning the tail — and suddenly the...
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