Britain Hands Romania’s Skies to Spain
Share this story For four months, the job of guarding NATO’s eastern edge over the Black Sea fell to a handful of British fighters sitting at cockpit readiness in Romania. Last week, they handed the watch to Spain and went home. On July 31, 2026, Royal Air Force...
Christmas 1938: The Atom Splits
Share this story Part 3 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 2 followed the exodus of Europe’s Jewish scientists. Now, in a Berlin laboratory those laws had just emptied, the uranium atom comes apart. Kungälv, on the Swedish west coast,...
The RAF’s Moonlight Taxi Into Occupied France
Share this story On certain moonlit nights during the Second World War, deep inside Nazi-occupied France, a handful of Resistance members would gather in a remote field and lay out three small torches in the shape of an L. Minutes later, a single black aircraft would...
The Americans Who Flew for France
Share this story On a French airfield in 1916, you might have found two lion cubs named Whiskey and Soda padding between the tents, and a group of young Americans who had crossed an ocean to fight a war their own country had not yet joined. This was the Escadrille...
Wizz Air Plants Its Flag in Sicily
Share this story Sicily just became the latest front in Europe’s low-cost air war. On August 1, 2026, Wizz Air based its first aircraft at Palermo’s Falcone Borsellino Airport, and two days later threw a launch party with the mayor and a planeload of...
Starlux Reaches Europe for the First Time
Share this story Just after midnight on August 1, 2026, an Airbus A350-900 lifted off from Taipei and pointed its nose at Central Europe. In the left-hand seat sat K.W. Chang — not a rostered captain, but the chairman of the airline, flying his own inaugural....
The Yak-3 That Frenchmen Flew Home to Keep
Share this story By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down...
Two Firefighting Helicopters Collide West of Athens
Share this story They had done it hundreds of times. Dip the snorkel, scoop a tonne of water, climb, run in low over the burning ridge, release, and turn back for more. On Sunday afternoon, over a wind-whipped fire front west of Athens, two firefighting helicopters...
France Gets Its First Special-Ops Caïman
Share this story France’s special forces are about to get a very different kind of helicopter. On Jul. 30, 2026, Airbus Helicopters announced the delivery of the first NH90 Caïman Standard 2 — a purpose-built special-operations version of France’s...
Britain Builds an Islander Again After 60 Years
Share this story It is one of the least glamorous aircraft in the sky and one of the most useful: a boxy, high-wing twin that lands in under a thousand feet, seats nine, and turns up wearing airline colours, army camouflage and even spy fits. Now, for the first time...
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