Operation Atlantic City: An RAF A400M Lands on Jan Mayen
There is no harbour on Jan Mayen. There is no town, no permanent population, and for most of the year not much daylight either. There is a strip of black volcanic gravel about a kilometre and a half long, no instrument approach, and a 2,277-metre volcano that...
Aevum RAVN X: The Cockpitless Jet That Woke Up at Long Beach
A plumber driving home past Long Beach Airport on Thursday evening saw light spilling out of a hangar that had been shut for years. He turned around. What he found parked on the ramp was eighty feet of matte black airframe with no cockpit, no canopy, and no obvious...
Ukraine Confirms Its Swedish ASC 890 Radar Plane Is Flying Combat
For four years Ukraine has fought an air war essentially blind above a certain altitude, relying on ground-based radar that cannot see over the horizon and cannot move quickly when it is targeted. On 5 September the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence confirmed something...
Austria’s Twelfth AW169 Lion Lands, a Third of the Fleet Done
A single helicopter arriving at a mountain airfield in Styria is not usually news. This one is, because it is the twelfth, and twelve is a third of the way through the largest helicopter recapitalisation the Austrian armed forces have ever attempted. The aircraft flew...
GE Aerospace Wins DIU Contract for Mach 5 Derecho Testbed
The hard part of hypersonics is not going fast. It is going fast often enough to learn anything. Flight tests above Mach 5 are rare, enormously expensive and frequently one-shot. A programme might get a handful of attempts across a decade, and if two of them fail...
VMFA-533 Brings F-35Bs to Iwakuni for the First Time
On Saturday morning a squadron of F-35Bs taxied onto the flight line at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, on the Seto Inland Sea, and took over a job the US Marine Corps has been rotating through Japan since 1980. The unit is Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 533, the...
USAF Wants a $10 Million Reaper Replacement by 2029
The United States Air Force has lost at least 45 MQ-9 Reapers since the Iran war began. That is roughly a quarter of the fleet, gone, in about a year. The service has now decided that the answer is not a better Reaper. It is a cheaper one — and it wants it four...
RAF Air Command Is Now Air & Space Command After 19 Years
The Royal Air Force has a motto that was chosen in 1912, long before anyone had a serious plan for getting there: per ardua ad astra, through adversity to the stars. On 1 September 2026 the RAF quietly took the astra part literally. Air Command, the headquarters of...
Rare P-40C Warhawk Belly-Lands in a Field Near Royston
The Fighter Collection at Duxford flies aeroplanes that most museums would bolt to a plinth. Late last month one of the rarest of them had an engine problem on a maintenance check flight and ended up on its belly in a field northwest of Royston. The pilot was not...
PEGASE 26: France Sends Four Rafales 40,000 km Around the World
Four fighters is not an air force. Four fighters, three tankers, two airlifters and three hundred people who can put all of that down on a foreign runway and have it flying again the next morning — that is an air force, compressed. On 8 September the French Air...
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