The Biggest Order of the Day Had No Aircraft
Airshow order announcements are usually about aeroplanes. One of the largest deals of Farnborough’s opening day involved no aircraft at all. BOC Aviation, the Singapore-based lessor, signed for as many as 300 CFM LEAP engines — up to 200 LEAP-1A and 100 LEAP-1B....
The Dreamliner That Turned Around Over England
Two hours out of Rome, somewhere over the south-east of England, Alaska Airlines flight 181 turned around. The Boeing 787-9 had left Fiumicino at 15:45 on Sunday afternoon bound for Seattle, climbed to 34,000 feet and headed north-west across France. Then the track on...
Britain’s New Drone Finally Gets Its Weapons
When the Royal Air Force retired its last Reaper in the autumn of 2025, it did so with a gap in the middle of its capability. The replacement was already flying — the Protector RG Mk 1, sixteen of them on order — but it could not yet legally drop or fire anything. At...
The Interceptor You Cannot Afford
On 9 July, eight Iranian ballistic missiles were fired at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. All eight were intercepted. Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged, and the incident barely registered outside the region. Eight days later the same base was attacked again, and...
The Weapon That Fires Nothing
There is an aircraft in most modern strike packages that carries no bombs, has no air-to-air kills, and will never appear on a recruiting poster. It is usually converted from something else, it is frequently ugly, and if it fails, everyone else dies. Electronic attack...
Nobody Agrees What Attacked the Stark
At 2005 on 17 May 1987, the guided missile frigate USS Stark was told that an Iraqi aircraft had left the mainland and was heading south down the Persian Gulf. This was not alarming. Iraqi aircraft did this most nights, hunting tankers carrying Iranian oil, and they...
The Transport That Became a Jammer
On 28 May 2017, a photographer at Miho Air Base in western Japan took a picture of a Kawasaki C-2 transport, tail number 68-1203. It was an unremarkable aeroplane doing an unremarkable thing: a high-winged, T-tailed freighter on a ramp, clean-lined and entirely...
Built for Mach 2, Too Slow to Get There
It looked like the future had landed on a dry lakebed in California: a needle-nosed, stiletto-slim jet built entirely for speed, sheathed in titanium, designed to cruise at twice the speed of sound. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was the sleekest research aircraft of its...
Hitler’s Flying Wing and the Stealth Myth
In the film Captain America, the villain escapes aboard a sleek, tailless flying wing. It looks like science fiction. It is not entirely invented: the design is lifted almost directly from a real German aircraft that flew in the last winter of the Second World War...
Curtiss Built a Fighter That Flew Tail-First
In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its engine at the...
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