Turn Them Into Bean Tins, Says Emirates
Ten Boeing 777-9s are sitting in Everett with nobody to fly them, and the man who ordered them has just suggested a use. Sir Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, told The Telegraph at Farnborough on Monday that his airline will not be taking the first batch of...
The $20,000 Rocket That Kills Drones
An AIM-120 AMRAAM costs about a million dollars. An AIM-9X Sidewinder costs around $450,000. A Shahed-type one-way attack drone costs perhaps $20,000 to $50,000, and Iran and its partners can build them faster than anyone can afford to shoot them down with...
The Ghost Bat Finally Came to Farnborough
Farnborough has been running since 1948. The Boeing MQ-28 Ghost Bat first flew in 2021. On Monday, finally, the two met. Australia’s uncrewed combat aircraft made its Farnborough debut on the show’s opening day — on static display, in the US Department of...
Three Drones, One Apache, Triple the Missiles
The model sitting under the lights on Anduril’s stand at Farnborough on Monday morning does not look like anything currently in the US Army inventory. It has two enormous tilting rotors, a fuselage shaped like a stretched teardrop, and where a cockpit should be...
The New Air Force One Is Going Back In
A reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Sunday evening asked President Trump a direct question: the Qatari jet he is now flying as Air Force One does not have antimissile defences, so why is he flying it? The answer confirmed what aviation and security specialists have...
The Drones Are Coming to Red Flag
Every argument about autonomous combat aircraft eventually arrives at the same question, and it is not a technical one. It is whether the person in the cockpit will trust the thing flying off their wing. Frank Kendall, who ran the US Air Force as its Secretary from...
The Wild Weasels Barely Unpacked
Two weeks ago the story was aircraft going home. Raptors leaving the Gulf for England, squadrons rotating out, a ceasefire holding well enough that the US Air Force felt comfortable thinning out its presence in the region. That lasted about as long as it took to write...
The Rocket-Powered Hercules Built to Land in a Stadium
In the autumn of 1980, American engineers strapped thirty rockets to a C-130 Hercules. The plan was insane and deadly serious: fly the four-engine transport into a soccer stadium in the middle of Tehran, stop it inside the length of the pitch, load fifty-two American...
A Startup Just Won $500M to Flood the Army With FPV Drones
Three years ago, Neros was two former teenage drone racers in a workshop. This week the U.S. Army handed the startup a contract worth up to $500 million to build first-person-view attack drones — the cheap, expendable weapons that have rewritten the rules of war in...
No Robot at the Controls: The B-21 Keeps Two Pilots
For years, one of the more futuristic rumours about America’s new stealth bomber was that it might not need much of a crew at all — that the B-21 Raider could fly with a single pilot, or eventually none. This month the Air Force put that speculation to rest with a...
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