Malpensa Power Bank Fire: easyJet A320 Evacuated by Slides
The safety demonstration had barely finished when the exits it describes were needed in earnest. At 17:24 on Thursday afternoon, easyJet flight U23905 pushed back from Terminal 2 at Milan Malpensa, bound for Prague with 146 passengers aboard. Seven minutes later, on a...
Emirates Gets Berlin: Lufthansa Calls It an Own Goal
The document that finally broke a thirty-year deadlock does not mention Emirates. It does not mention Berlin either. It speaks, in the flat register of diplomacy, of an additional fifth point in the route schedule for a national carrier of the United Arab Emirates....
Poland’s $4 Billion US Loan: More F-35s, Maybe
A signature in a museum is not a fighter order. It is worth holding on to that distinction this week, because the two things are already being folded into one another. On 9 September 2026, at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control...
Europe’s Most Extreme Airports: Highest, Steepest, Shortest
The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama: aerodrome availability is...
The Bruneval Raid: Britain Parachuted In and Stole a Radar
On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British scientists had...
Saab Takes SEK 2.9 Billion to Design Sweden’s Next Fighter
Sweden has roughly ten million people and builds its own fighter aircraft. It has done so, without interruption, since the 1940s. That is a peculiar and slightly improbable national habit, and on 9 September 2026 Stockholm quietly paid to keep it going for another...
NATS Outage: 2,000 UK Flights Cancelled, and a One-Week Deadline
Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled flights, a week-long...
Germany’s First F-35A: 35+01 Flies at Fort Worth
Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code 35+01. Lockheed...
Swiss F-35: Could Viola Amherd Be Personally Liable?
The question being asked in Bern this afternoon is not whether the F-35 procurement went wrong. That is settled. It is whether anyone will personally pay for it. A day after the oversight committee reported that Switzerland never had a fixed price for its F-35As, the...
Italy Orders Two MQ-9A Reapers Built for Nobody
Somewhere in San Diego there were two MQ-9A Reapers that nobody had bought. They are Italian now. A note on the pictures: no photograph of an Italian Air Force MQ-9 is available under a licence we can use, so the aircraft shown here are US Air Force Reapers of the...
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