Serbia Buys Chinese HQ-9: Beijing’s Missiles in NATO’s Backyard
Share this story Two hundred miles from the nearest NATO border, Serbia is building an air defence network that Beijing designed and no Western alliance approved. On 28 June, President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed what defence analysts had suspected for months: Belgrade...
The Duck That Invented the Seaplane
Share this story It is the morning of 28 March 1910, and a thin mist still clings to the Étang de Berre, the great salt lagoon west of Marseille. A 27-year-old engineer named Henri Fabre sits astride a slender wooden beam, perched above three flat floats that bob...
France Turns a Cargo Plane Into a War Brain
Share this story It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console,...
Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145
Share this story Walk the static line at ILA Berlin and you expect the usual choreography around a helicopter: a pilot strapping in, a crew chief signalling, the slow whine of an Arriel engine spooling up. This June, Airbus parked something stranger under the...
Russian Blackjacks Meet Norway’s F-35s Over the Arctic
Share this story For roughly sixteen hours on 23 June 2026, two of the largest combat aircraft ever built carved a long arc through the cold airspace of the European Arctic. Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers — the variable-sweep giants NATO calls...
Britain’s Giant Flying Boat, Born Too Late
Share this story At the Farnborough air show in 1953, the crowd hears it before they see it. Ten engines, building from a hum to a roar, and then the largest all-metal flying boat ever built slides overhead — a silver whale of an aircraft, a 219-foot wing, an...
Britain’s Cheap Deep-Strike Weapons Head to Ukraine
Share this story British defence programmes are not, as a rule, famous for speed. The Ajax armoured vehicle spent eight years mired in delay; the RAF’s Wedgetail radar aircraft arrived three years late. So when three new long-range strike weapons go from a sheet...
Hanoi’s Hard Choice: Rafale or Su-57
Share this story For sixty years, the answer to the question “what does Vietnam fly?” has been simple: whatever Moscow sold it. MiGs, then Sukhois — a proud, entirely Russian air force. In 2026, for the first time, that answer is genuinely in doubt,...
The Drone Ukraine Sang About Is Killing Again
Share this story The footage is grey and silent. A drone’s electro-optical camera holds a small boat in its crosshairs somewhere in the middle of the Black Sea; a laser spot blooms on the hull; the picture shudders. To anyone who lived through the spring of...
Lufthansa Put a 1950s Design on a Modern Jet
Share this story 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...
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