The First Balloon to Circle the World
On 21 March 1999, two exhausted men brought a towering silver balloon down onto the Egyptian desert and stepped into the history books. Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones had just done what pioneers had tried and failed to do for decades: fly all the way around the...
Bulgaria’s New F-16s Will Be Three Years Late
Bulgaria has spent years trying to drag its air force into the NATO era, and it has just been handed some unwelcome news. The second batch of eight brand-new F-16 Block 70 fighters, once promised by the end of 2027, may not arrive until 2030. Lockheed Martin has told...
Saab Reveals Its Stealthy Supersonic Fighter Drone
On Aug. 21, 2026, at Malmen Air Base in Sweden, Saab chose the Swedish Air Force’s 100th birthday to pull the cover off its vision of the next one hundred years. Standing on the floor was a full-scale mock-up of a tailless, stealthy, supersonic drone, an...
Sweden’s Gripen Fires Its First Taurus Missile
For the first time, one of the smallest and cheapest fighters in Europe has reached far beyond the horizon. On Aug. 21, 2026, a Swedish Air Force JAS 39 Gripen C released a live Taurus KEPD 350 cruise missile over the Vidsel Test Range in Norrbotten, in the Arctic...
Norse Atlantic Draws Strong Takeover Interest
There is a particular kind of turbulence that never shows on the weather radar, and Norse Atlantic Airways flew straight into it this month. The Norwegian long-haul low-cost carrier used its second-quarter results, published on 20 August 2026, to confirm what much of...
Aer Lingus Cuts Five US Routes
Aer Lingus began 2026 promising its largest-ever transatlantic schedule. It will end the year having quietly dismantled five of its US routes, a retreat that says as much about the economics of the North Atlantic as it does about one Irish carrier. The reset spans...
Sweden’s Flying Barrel Went to War for the UN
It looked like a beer barrel with wings, and the Swedes said so themselves — they called it Flygande Tunnan, the “Flying Barrel.” But behind that comical shape hid a serious pioneer: the first swept-wing fighter to enter squadron service anywhere in...
NATO Massed Its Jets Right Next to Kaliningrad
On Tuesday, 18 August 2026, a very unusual crowd gathered in the sky over northern Poland and the Baltic — and every serious flight-tracker in Europe stopped to watch. In a large, U.S.-led NATO air exercise, a dense package of allied aircraft flew combat-strike,...
A Budget Jet to Frankfurt: Air Arabia Goes Daily
The Gulf’s low-cost giant is about to do something low-cost carriers are not supposed to do: fly a narrowbody, non-stop, five and a half hours to the heart of Europe — every single day. On 19 August 2026, Air Arabia announced a new daily service between...
Lufthansa Just Switched On Starlink at 33,000 Feet
At 10,000 metres somewhere between Frankfurt and Rome, Jens Ritter reached up and switched on the internet. The gesture, aboard an Airbus A320neo named “November Mike,” marked the first Lufthansa passenger flight flying with Wi-Fi powered by Starlink...
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