“Konkordski”: The Soviet Concorde That Flew First
Share this story On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov,...
Canada Picks an Italian Jet to Train Its Pilots
Share this story When you buy a front-line fighter, you also have to solve a quieter problem: how to train the pilots who will fly it. On 16 June 2026, Canada took a major step toward an answer — and the jet it chose is Italian. On the sidelines of the G7 summit...
France Fires Its New Missile at Supersonic Speed
Share this story High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things...
A Pilot Just Flew a Drone From Another Jet
Share this story Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other...
The Tiger Gets a New Set of Claws
Share this story The attack helicopter has spent the last few years being written off. Ukraine’s skies, thick with man-portable missiles and cheap drones, have looked like an unkind place for a low, slow gunship. Europe’s answer is not to retire its Tiger — but to...
Europe Rolls Out Its Robot Wingmen
Share this story For years, the race to build “robot wingmen” — uncrewed jets that fight alongside human pilots — looked like an American and Australian story. In a single week in June, Europe planted its flag.At the ILA air show in Berlin, two very different European...
Turkey’s Radar-Killer Jet Steps Into View
Share this story It looks, at a glance, like a rich man’s toy: a sleek Bombardier business jet, the kind that ferries executives between capitals. Then you notice the lumps. A long blade running down its spine, blisters under the belly, a fairing crowning the tail —...
Airbus Flies the World’s Longest-Range Airliner
Share this story On the morning of 2 June, a pale green, primer-coated jet lifted off from Toulouse and climbed past 41,000 feet over the south of France. It carried no passengers, only test instrumentation and a hand-picked Airbus crew. It also carried a title: the...
306 Souls, Two Dead Engines, One Glide
Share this story It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking...
Romania’s F-16s Score Their First Baltic Intercept
Share this story The Alpha Scramble order reaches the quick reaction alert shelter at Šiauliai before the coffee has cooled. Two Romanian F-16s, fuelled and armed, are airborne over the grey Baltic within minutes, vectored toward an unidentified contact...
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