Britain Is Scrapping the Wildcat. Leonardo Sees a Future.
Britain has decided that its Army no longer needs a dedicated scout helicopter. Under the Defence Investment Plan published on 30 June 2026, all 34 of the British Army’s Leonardo Wildcat AH1 reconnaissance helicopters will begin leaving service from 2027, their...
A Billion-Dollar Radar Jet Buyer Nobody Can Name
The order is worth SEK 10.1 billion — a little over one billion US dollars. It covers two of the most sophisticated surveillance aircraft flying today. And the customer? Saab will not say. Not the country, not the air force, not a single identifying detail. On...
Smoke Over the Atlantic Sends a SWISS Jet to Maine
Somewhere over the cold Atlantic off Nova Scotia, about six and a half hours into an eight-hour crossing, passengers in the front of a Zurich-to-New York flight caught the one smell nobody wants at 30,000 feet: hot electrics. Smoke was seeping into the forward...
Japan Names the Factory That Will Build GCAP
There is a hangar in Aichi Prefecture where Japan already bolts together the most advanced fighter it has ever flown — the F-35 Lightning II, screwed together under licence for the Air Self-Defense Force. Soon that same hall will assemble something Japan helped design...
The Pilot Who Wrote The Little Prince and Vanished
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 missions at all. He...
Boeing Pips Airbus in a Subdued Farnborough
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 booked 173 orders to...
Poland’s First Home-Built F-35 Takes to the Air
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 Cameri, Italy,...
Britain Names Its First Combat Drone: Brontanax
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 first sovereign...
Indonesia Buys a Trainer That Shoots Back
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 Defence for 12...
Europe Quietly Joins the Ghost Bat
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 become an official...
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