The Charter Business Built on Soviet Freighters
Share this story For twenty years, the way NATO moved something too big for its own aeroplanes was to ring a Ukrainian company and a Russian one. That sentence has aged badly, and the arrangement behind it is one of the stranger things the post-Cold-War world...
Why Nothing Can Replace the Antonov An-124
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Danish F-35s Land in Greenland for the First Time
Share this story There is a photograph from Kangerlussuaq on 16 September that does more work than any communiqué. Two Danish F-35As, four American F-16s and two Canadian CF-18s, parked together on a single strip of asphalt at the head of a Greenland fjord. The Royal...
Europe’s Airlift Gap: EDA Weighs An-124 Refit or a New C-17
Share this story There are two aircraft in the world that can pick up something genuinely enormous and fly it a very long way. One is Ukrainian and first flew in 1982. The other is American and stopped being built in 2015. Europe owns almost none of either, and the...
Vilnius Airport Shut by Balloons: NATO Confirms a Hybrid Uptick
Share this story At a quarter to midnight on Monday, Vilnius International Airport stopped accepting arrivals. The cause was not weather, not a technical fault, and not a drone. It was balloons. Lithuanian authorities detected what the airport described as...
Airbus Broughton: The A380 Wing Hall Becomes an A321 Factory
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
NATS Prestwick Outage: Scotland’s Airspace Throttled Again
Share this story Thirteen days. That is how long British aviation got between one national air traffic control failure and the next. Early on Monday morning a connectivity fault hit the NATS centre at Prestwick, the facility that runs Scottish upper airspace and feeds...
CT-157 Siskin II: Canada Swaps Snowbird Jets for a Turboprop
Share this story At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the...
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
Share this story A carrier deck is about 300 metres long, and a loaded fighter needs something closer to a kilometre. That gap is the entire problem of naval aviation, and the world has settled on exactly two answers to it: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the...
Skytrax 2026: Singapore Airlines Takes a Sixth World’s Best
Share this story On Friday evening at the Langham Hotel in London, Singapore Airlines was named the World’s Best Airline for the sixth time in the history of the Skytrax World Airline Awards. Qatar Airways, last year’s winner and a nine-time holder of the...
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