Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
Share this story In 1968, for two months, Eastern Air Lines flew fare-paying passengers between cities in the north-eastern United States in a French military transport with four propellers all driven by the same shaft. The following year American Airlines tried the...
Bell XV-15: The Tiltrotor That Bowed to the Crowd
Share this story At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a...
Ukraine’s Next Fighter Pilots Are Training on L-39s in Canada
Share this story There is a pleasing symmetry in the pictures the Ukrainian presidential office released on Saturday. Twenty-one Ukrainian military pilots are in Canada learning to fly Western fighters. The aircraft they are learning on is a Czechoslovak jet trainer...
Sabena 548: The Crash That Erased a National Team
Share this story On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on...
France Orders Eight Airbus U050 Capa-X Drones
Share this story The whole system fits on two pickup trucks. That sentence, buried in an Airbus press release, is the reason the French armed forces have just ordered eight of these aircraft. On 10 September 2026 France’s Aeronautical Maintenance Directorate...
GCAP Fighter Electronics: Edgewing Awards G2E Contract
Share this story Most fighter contracts that make the news are about metal: airframes, engines, how many and how much. This one is about something you cannot photograph, and it may matter more than any of that. On 10 September 2026, Edgewing — the company...
Wizz Air Strips Engines From Its Parked A321XLRs
Share this story There is a particular kind of corporate embarrassment that can only be photographed from an airport perimeter fence. At Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, a handful of nearly new Airbus A321XLRs are parked up with holes where their engines used to be. The...
Malpensa Power Bank Fire: easyJet A320 Evacuated by Slides
Share this story The safety demonstration had barely finished when the exits it describes were needed in earnest. At 17:24 on Thursday afternoon, easyJet flight U23905 pushed back from Terminal 2 at Milan Malpensa, bound for Prague with 146 passengers aboard. Seven...
Emirates Gets Berlin: Lufthansa Calls It an Own Goal
Share this story The document that finally broke a thirty-year deadlock does not mention Emirates. It does not mention Berlin either. It speaks, in the flat register of diplomacy, of an additional fifth point in the route schedule for a national carrier of the United...
Poland’s $4 Billion US Loan: More F-35s, Maybe
Share this story A signature in a museum is not a fighter order. It is worth holding on to that distinction this week, because the two things are already being folded into one another. On 9 September 2026, at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, Under Secretary of State...
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