There is a particular elegance to watching a country refuse to choose sides. For half a century Egypt bought its wings where the politics of the moment allowed, Soviet MiGs, then American Falcons, then French Rafales, always a client, never a builder. Now Cairo...
There is a quiet satisfaction, for anyone raised on the sight of the delta-winged chasse française, in watching the Rafale finally take its place in the fight it was arguably designed for. France’s most senior voices are no longer hedging. A French...
In December 2025, a man in a minivan with Massachusetts plates parked near the fence line at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and pointed a camera at the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers on the ramp. He had been warned off once already. He came back. This month he was...
The world’s air forces are racing to build the fighter that will replace the stealth jets of today — the so-called sixth generation. These aircraft promise tailless all-aspect stealth, artificial intelligence, adaptive engines, and the ability to command...
Somewhere over the Baltic this summer, a French Rafale slid into formation beside a Russian jet that almost never lets itself be seen. The aircraft was a Tupolev Tu-214PU — a rare, specially-equipped command aircraft that open-source analysts link to Russia’s...
Switzerland’s first F-35A Lightning II is no longer a set of drawings and contracts. It is now metal. In a hall at Cameri, in the Italian region of Piedmont, the first fuselage section of a Swiss jet has been mated to its first wing — the earliest physical sign...
Munich Airport has had a nervous week. On the evening of 17 August 2026, a Lufthansa Airbus A380 arriving from San Francisco touched down short of its runway and ploughed through the approach lighting at the threshold. All 351 people on board were unhurt, and the...
The Mirage 2000 first flew in 1978. The precision bomb now hanging under the United Arab Emirates’ version of it was designed in Abu Dhabi in the 2020s. That gap — a Cold War delta wing carrying a home-grown 21st-century weapon — is the whole story of a new...
For thirty years, the sound of Finland’s air defence has been the twin-engine howl of the F/A-18 Hornet. Now the clock on that sound has started ticking down. As Finland’s first F-35A Lightning II stealth fighters move through training in the United...
In a high-bay hall in Fort Worth, Texas, a matte-grey shape is about to disappear. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II, the airframe stamped MG-01, has rolled out of final assembly and into the stage Lockheed Martin calls Aircraft Final Finishes: the point where...
India’s largest fighter purchase in a generation is not stuck on money. It is not stuck on delivery dates, offsets, or how many aircraft get built in Nashik rather than Bordeaux. It is stuck on lines of code.New Delhi wants access to the software architecture at...
At 04:44 on Sunday morning, a Romanian radar operator watched a small, slow-moving return cross the Prut and slide into national airspace from Moldova, roughly 24 kilometres north of Galați. Seventeen minutes later it no longer existed.The aircraft that killed it...
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