Qatar Denies Holding Iran’s Downed Su-24 Crews
Share this story Five months after two Iranian bombers were blown out of the sky short of a US air base in Qatar, a strange and very human question has resurfaced: what happened to the men who were flying them? On 15 August, Iran’s Armed Forces General Staff...
Ukraine’s Flamingo Strikes a Soyuz Rocket Plant
Share this story In the small hours of 15 August, air-raid sirens climbed over Russia’s Samara region. Minutes later, residents nearly 900 kilometres from the Ukrainian border were filming a wall of orange fire rising above an industrial district — the...
The French Jet That Everyone Copied
Share this story Look at almost any small jet airliner of the 1960s and 1970s, the Douglas DC-9, the Boeing 727, the BAC One-Eleven, the Fokker F28, and you will see the same clever idea: the engines mounted at the tail, leaving the wing clean and the cabin quiet....
The Beautiful French Fighter Nobody Would Buy
Share this story It was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, and one of the most complete. Bigger, faster and longer-legged than the Mirage 2000 it grew from, the Dassault Mirage 4000 was France’s bid to build a true heavyweight, a...
Rafale Meets Flanker Over Malaysia
Share this story For a week in mid-August, the skies over Selangor turned into a laboratory of contrasts: French delta-wing fighters flown by Indian pilots, sparring with Russian-built Flankers and American Hornets in Malaysian colours. Exercise Udara Shakti 2026 put...
NATO Guns Down a Drone Over Latvia
Share this story On the morning of August 14, 2026, NATO fighter jets on Baltic Air Policing duty scrambled over eastern Latvia and shot down a drone that had crossed into the alliance’s airspace. The Latvian military said the aircraft had strayed into the...
The Spies Hunting Ukraine’s Hidden Fighters
Share this story The most dangerous place for a Ukrainian fighter jet is not the sky. It is the ground. On August 13, 2026, Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, said it had dismantled a Russian intelligence network of fourteen people whose job was to find out...
Be-200 Altair, Russia’s Amphibious Water Bomber
Share this story A wall of orange climbs a Greek hillside, and out of the smoke drops a white-and-blue jet skimming the sea. It touches the waves, drinks twelve tonnes of water in fourteen seconds, hauls itself back into the sky and unloads the lot onto the flames....
Fouga Magister, Butterfly-Tailed Jet That Went to War
Share this story On the morning of 5 June 1967, a handful of little French-built trainers lifted off from Israeli airfields on what looked like a routine sortie. Within hours they were diving on armour in the Sinai. The Fouga Magister, a jet designed to teach...
The First Blackhawk Was a Record-Breaking Gunship
Share this story Before the UH-60 wore the name, there was another Blackhawk, and it was a snarling gunship. The Sikorsky S-67 first flew on 20 August 1970, a sleek, low-slung attack helicopter built entirely on Sikorsky’s own money in a frantic nine-month...
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