The Pilot Who Wrote The Little Prince and Vanished
Share this story On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat...
Boeing Pips Airbus in a Subdued Farnborough
Share this story Farnborough 2026 has closed, and for once the headline is not a record. Boeing came out narrowly ahead of Airbus in the order race — but the show’s real story was how modest that race turned out to be. By Reuters’ tally, Boeing...
Poland’s First Home-Built F-35 Takes to the Air
Share this story Poland’s stealth fighter has, until now, been an American export — built in Fort Worth, Texas, and flown across the Atlantic. This week that changed. The first Polish F-35A assembled in Europe, at Leonardo’s final-assembly line in...
Britain Names Its First Combat Drone: Brontanax
Share this story The reveal came without a flypast, without a scream of afterburner. On the second day of the Farnborough International Airshow, BAE Systems pulled a cover from a matt-grey, tailless aircraft roughly the size of a Hawk trainer and gave Britain its...
Indonesia Buys a Trainer That Shoots Back
Share this story Jakarta went shopping for a frontline fighter and came home, instead, with a very clever trainer that shoots back.At Farnborough on 21 July, Leonardo and its Indonesian partner PT ESystem Solutions signed a contract with Indonesia’s Ministry of...
Europe Quietly Joins the Ghost Bat
Share this story Australia built the Ghost Bat. Europe, it turns out, has been quietly helping all along — and at Farnborough, Boeing finally said so out loud.On 21 July, MQ-28 Program Global Director Glen Ferguson confirmed that Italy’s Leonardo has...
Sweden Wants Twelve More Gripens Back
Share this story Sweden is giving Ukraine a fighter fleet. At Farnborough this week, the head of the Swedish Air Force explained how Sweden intends to avoid ending up smaller as a result. Major General Jonas Wikman told Breaking Defense that a further batch of twelve...
The Drone Built by Two Secret Labs
Share this story Skunk Works and FalconWorks are the two most secretive advanced-projects shops in Western aerospace. Lockheed Martin’s built the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117. BAE Systems’ is the British equivalent, the place where the awkward, classified...
How the Force de Frappe Actually Works
Share this story France is the only member of NATO that delivers part of its nuclear deterrent from a fighter cockpit, and the only one whose deterrent answers to nobody outside Paris. Last week two French Rafales flew alongside German Eurofighters in the first joint...
The Last Old-Fashioned Air War
Share this story Militarily, Suez worked. In six days, Anglo-French air power destroyed the Egyptian Air Force largely on the ground, paratroops took an airfield, Royal Marines made the first helicopter assault in the history of warfare, and the invasion force held...
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