Airbus Keeps Its Lead Over Boeing
July was, by Airbus’s recent standards, a quiet month. The European planemaker handed over 67 aircraft to 39 customers — a step down from 89 in June and 81 in May. And yet, halfway-plus through 2026, Airbus is still comfortably in front.The running total...
Poland’s MiG-29s Are Going to Ukraine After All
For months the story ran the wrong way. Poland was going to scrap its last MiG-29 fighters rather than hand them to Ukraine, a drones-for-jets deal apparently dead in the water. On 7 August 2026 the narrative flipped.Ukraine’s Ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar,...
France Puts 114 Rafales on India’s Table
France has made its move. On 6 August 2026, Dassault Aviation handed New Delhi a formal techno-commercial proposal for 114 Rafale fighters — the long-awaited answer to India’s Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) tender, and one of the largest single fighter...
A Bomb Drone Beside Europe’s Cargo Giant
Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, an airport worker at Leipzig/Halle spotted something that should not have been there: a drone, sitting on the tarmac near the south runway, carrying an explosive device. It was resting a short distance from one of the largest...
Britain Hands Romania’s Skies to Spain
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 personnel from...
Christmas 1938: The Atom Splits
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 third day of...
The RAF’s Moonlight Taxi Into Occupied France
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 slip out of the...
The Americans Who Flew for France
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 Lafayette —...
Wizz Air Plants Its Flag in Sicily
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 passengers to make the...
Starlux Reaches Europe for the First Time
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. Nine hours later...
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