RAF Protector RG1 Tracks Russian Frigate in First UK Mission
Share this story For years, the most capable surveillance drone in the Royal Air Force was not allowed to fly over Britain at all. In October, its successor spent more than ten hours over the English Channel, watching a Russian warship sail past the south coast. Late...
LOT Embraer E170 Farewell: The World’s First E170 Operator Bows Out
Share this story On Friday 30 October 2026, an Embraer E170 registered SP-LDH flew from Warsaw to Vienna and back, and then LOT Polish Airlines took it out of service. It was the airline’s last E170, and with it LOT closed a story it had started on the very same...
Rafale Marine Landing on INS Vikrant: Maiden Attempt Succeeds
Share this story On Thursday 29 October 2026, a Dassault Rafale Marine lined up behind INS Vikrant, India’s first home-built aircraft carrier, dropped its hook and came aboard. It was the first time the French naval fighter had landed on an Indian deck, and the...
Giulio Gavotti: The First Bomb Dropped From an Aeroplane, 1911
Share this story The morning of 1 November 1911 is quiet over the oases outside Tripoli. A small monoplane drones above the palms at roughly 600 feet. In the cockpit, a young Italian second lieutenant reaches into a leather pouch, takes out something the size of a...
Why Soyuz Lands on the Kazakh Steppe: Three Hours From Orbit to Zhezkazgan
Share this story Every Soyuz crew that comes home from the International Space Station ends the trip in the same place: the flat, empty steppe of central Kazakhstan, typically south-east of the town of Zhezkazgan. The region has been the Soviet and Russian landing...
Special Flight Permit vs Permit to Fly: FAA and EASA Compared
Share this story Somewhere this morning an aeroplane took off that does not meet its own type design. Perhaps its annual inspection lapsed three weeks ago. Perhaps an airworthiness directive has not been complied with, or a piece of equipment outside the minimum...
Italian CH-47F Crashes Near Brcko: Four Dead on EUFOR Althea
Share this story The light was already going on Thursday afternoon when a twin-rotor shape lifted away from the airfield at Brčko, in the flat farmland where Bosnia and Herzegovina runs up against the river Sava. Phone cameras on the ground caught what happened...
Frecce Tricolori M-346: First Jet Makes Its Maiden Flight
Share this story Days after it was wheeled out of the factory, the first jet built for Italy’s new-generation Frecce Tricolori has left the ground. The M-346 in the team’s new Pininfarina livery made its maiden flight from Leonardo’s airfield at...
Operation Pedestal: The Carrier Air Battle That Saved Malta in 1942
Share this story At 09:30 on 15 August 1942, a tanker that had been torpedoed, bombed and hit by a crashing dive bomber crept into Grand Harbour, Valletta. She had a broken back, her decks were almost awash, and two destroyers were lashed to her sides to hold her up....
Battle of Crete: How Operation Merkur Ended Germany’s Airborne Era
Share this story At eight o’clock on the morning of 20 May 1941, the sky over western Crete filled with Junkers Ju 52 transports flying low and slow over the olive groves. Out of their doors tumbled the Fallschirmjäger, Germany’s elite paratroopers,...
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