


Poland Opens Europe’s Biggest Apache Service Centre
Share this story Poland has ordered 96 AH-64E Apache Guardians. When they arrive it will be the second-largest Apache fleet on earth, behind only the United States Army. Ninety-six attack helicopters is a headline. What happened at a factory in Łódź...
Dutch MQ-9A Reaper Flies Armed for the First Time
Share this story The Netherlands bought the MQ-9 Reaper in 2011 as a pair of eyes. No weapons, no requirement for them, no intention of adding any. For fifteen years that held. On Thursday 20 August 2026, a Royal Netherlands Air Force MQ-9A took off from Leeuwarden...
Norway Swaps Rescue Helicopters for 21 UH-60M Black Hawks
Share this story In July 2025 the United States approved the sale of nine HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters to Norway. It was a specialised, expensive, superbly capable machine built for one demanding job: going into hostile territory to bring downed...
Ukraine Wants Its Gripens and Rafales Built at Home
Share this story Ukraine is not only buying Western fighters — it wants to build them. The contracts Kyiv has signed for Gripen and Rafale jets include provisions to localise their production and maintenance inside Ukraine, the country’s Air Force aviation...
Macchi M.C.72: The Fastest Seaplane Ever Built
Share this story On a grey October afternoon in 1934, the mountains above Lake Garda heard something they would never hear again. A scarlet machine sat low on the water at Desenzano, twin floats trembling, and then its engine spoke — not a drone but a detonating...
Juan de la Cierva’s Autogiro: The Windmill That Refused to Stall
Share this story There is a particular kind of genius that begins not with ambition but with fear. Juan de la Cierva was afraid of the stall — that treacherous moment when a wing, robbed of airspeed, simply stops flying and drops its pilot out of the sky. In...
A Top Airman Questions the Tejas Mk-2
Share this story India’s most ambitious home-built fighter has drawn sharp criticism from an unlikely quarter: one of the officers who helped run the air force until weeks ago. Air Marshal Nagesh Kapoor, who stepped down as the Indian Air Force’s Vice...
Ukraine’s Deepest Strike Yet Hits a Rosneft Refinery
Share this story Ukraine mounted one of its deepest strikes of the summer overnight on 22 August 2026, sending long-range drones more than 1,000 kilometres into Russia’s Samara region. By morning two sites were burning: the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery, part of...
The First Balloon to Circle the World
Share this story 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...
Bulgaria’s New F-16s Will Be Three Years Late
Share this story 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...
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