The Typist Who Flew Solo to Australia
Share this story In May 1930 a 26-year-old typist’s daughter from Hull climbed into a second-hand biplane she had named Jason, pointed it toward the far side of the planet, and set out to fly alone to Australia. Amy Johnson had held a pilot’s licence for...
Britain Is Scrapping the Wildcat. Leonardo Sees a Future.
Share this story Britain has decided that its Army no longer needs a dedicated scout helicopter. Under the Defence Investment Plan published on 30 June 2026, all 34 of the British Army’s Leonardo Wildcat AH1 reconnaissance helicopters will begin leaving service...
A Billion-Dollar Radar Jet Buyer Nobody Can Name
Share this story The order is worth SEK 10.1 billion — a little over one billion US dollars. It covers two of the most sophisticated surveillance aircraft flying today. And the customer? Saab will not say. Not the country, not the air force, not a single...
Smoke Over the Atlantic Sends a SWISS Jet to Maine
Share this story Somewhere over the cold Atlantic off Nova Scotia, about six and a half hours into an eight-hour crossing, passengers in the front of a Zurich-to-New York flight caught the one smell nobody wants at 30,000 feet: hot electrics. Smoke was seeping into...
Japan Names the Factory That Will Build GCAP
Share this story There is a hangar in Aichi Prefecture where Japan already bolts together the most advanced fighter it has ever flown — the F-35 Lightning II, screwed together under licence for the Air Self-Defense Force. Soon that same hall will assemble something...
The Pilot Who Wrote The Little Prince and Vanished
Share this story On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat...
Boeing Pips Airbus in a Subdued Farnborough
Share this story Farnborough 2026 has closed, and for once the headline is not a record. Boeing came out narrowly ahead of Airbus in the order race — but the show’s real story was how modest that race turned out to be. By Reuters’ tally, Boeing...
Poland’s First Home-Built F-35 Takes to the Air
Share this story Poland’s stealth fighter has, until now, been an American export — built in Fort Worth, Texas, and flown across the Atlantic. This week that changed. The first Polish F-35A assembled in Europe, at Leonardo’s final-assembly line in...
Britain Names Its First Combat Drone: Brontanax
Share this story The reveal came without a flypast, without a scream of afterburner. On the second day of the Farnborough International Airshow, BAE Systems pulled a cover from a matt-grey, tailless aircraft roughly the size of a Hawk trainer and gave Britain its...
Indonesia Buys a Trainer That Shoots Back
Share this story Jakarta went shopping for a frontline fighter and came home, instead, with a very clever trainer that shoots back.At Farnborough on 21 July, Leonardo and its Indonesian partner PT ESystem Solutions signed a contract with Indonesia’s Ministry of...
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