Airbus Flies the World’s Longest-Range Airliner
On the morning of 2 June, a pale green, primer-coated jet lifted off from Toulouse and climbed past 41,000 feet over the south of France. It carried no passengers, only test instrumentation and a hand-picked Airbus crew. It also carried a title: the longest-range...
306 Souls, Two Dead Engines, One Glide
It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking toward a black ocean...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact loitering off the...
The $3,500 Drone That Kills Without a Pilot
The buzz of a Shahed over Kharkiv has become one of the most dreaded sounds of this war. On the night of 8 June 2026, something answered it that no human was flying. A small fixed-wing interceptor lifted off, climbed to its waiting altitude, picked the incoming drone...
Brazil Builds Its First Supersonic Fighter
Brazil just did something only a handful of countries on Earth can claim: it built its own supersonic fighter jet. On 25 March 2026, Embraer, Saab and the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) pulled the covers off the first Gripen E assembled on Brazilian soil at Embraer’s...
Indonesia Gets Its First Rafales: Three Down, 39 to Go
It is official: Indonesia is now a Rafale operator. The first three Dassault Rafale fighters touched down at Roesmin Nurjadin Air Base in Pekanbaru, Sumatra, on 23 January 2026 — the opening batch of an eventual 42-jet fleet that will become the sharpest edge of...
Switzerland’s First F-35A Is Now Being Built — As the Order Shrinks
It is officially happening: the first jet that will one day wear a Swiss cross is now bolted together on a factory floor in Georgia. After years of votes, lawsuits and price rows, Switzerland’s F-35A has stopped being a PowerPoint slide and started being an...
Ravenstorm: Airbus Enters the Robot-Wingman Race
At ILA Berlin, Airbus pulled the covers off a long, dark shape with knife-thin wings and no cockpit — and gave Europe its clearest look yet at the robot fighter it wants to send to war alongside its pilots. The aircraft is the U-760 Ravenstorm, an uncrewed...
The Tanker War Washington Fought With Itself
It was a Friday afternoon at the Pentagon, 29 February 2008 — a leap day, fittingly, for a decision almost nobody saw coming. Air Force officials stepped before the press to name the winner of the KC-X tanker programme, 179 aircraft and roughly 35 billion dollars, and...
Recent Comments