NATO Jets Shoot Down a Drone Over Lithuania
Share this story Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, NATO fighter aircraft shot down an unidentified drone in Lithuanian airspace. It came down near the village of Pratkūnai, in Kaunas County in the centre of the country. The Lithuanian authorities logged the...
Fiat G.55 Centauro: Italy’s Best Fighter, Built Too Late
Share this story In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst...
Meiringen F-35 Noise Test Slips a Year Over a Missing Net
Share this story 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...
Tarom’s First 737 MAX Arrives as Its Rescue Plan Slips
Share this story 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,...
Tu-95 at Engels-2: A Second Bomber Russia Cannot Replace
Share this story 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...
Rafale F5: France Orders the First Contracts After FCAS Died
Share this story 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...
Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily
Share this story 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...
Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
Share this story 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...
Bell XV-15: The Tiltrotor That Bowed to the Crowd
Share this story 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...
Ukraine’s Next Fighter Pilots Are Training on L-39s in Canada
Share this story 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...
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