Congo L-410 Crash at Kenge Kills Two of the Army’s Top Generals
Share this story The flight should have been routine: a short hop from Kikwit back to Kinshasa for a delegation returning from an official mission. Instead, on the afternoon of Friday 25 September, a Let L-410 Turbolet came down on a residential plot in Kenge, in the...
Fiat G.91 Gina: The Jet That Won NATO’s Own Contest
Share this story NATO has run a lot of joint procurement competitions. Almost all of them ended with every country buying something different anyway. Exactly one produced an aircraft that three air forces actually flew, in numbers, for decades. It was small, it was...
Canada Signs GlobalEye Term Sheet With Saab for Six Radar Jets
Share this story Ottawa put out a press release on Thursday morning with the word capability in the headline and four ministers queued up to welcome it. Read past the quotes and the document Canada actually signed is a term sheet — a written agreement about what...
Bone, BUFF and Viper: Where Aircraft Nicknames Come From
Share this story Walk onto a US Air Force flight line and ask someone to point you at a Fighting Falcon and you will get a blank look, then a correction. It is a Viper. The Lancer over there is a Bone. The Stratofortress is a BUFF, and nobody has called the A-10 a...
Flight Deck Jersey Colours: Who Does What on a Carrier
Share this story Stand on the bridge wing of an American aircraft carrier during flight operations and the deck below looks like a paint chart having a nervous breakdown. Yellow, green, red, purple, blue, brown and white, all moving at once, in a space the size of...
F-117 Nighthawk: Retired in 2008, Still Flying in 2026
Share this story In December 2025 a photographer in the California desert filmed two black diamonds coming through a low-level route at a few hundred feet. In 2026 another one caught them again. The aircraft were F-117 Nighthawks, and the United States Air Force...
Henschel Hs 129: The Cockpit So Tight the Dials Went Outside
Share this story There is a simple test for how badly an aircraft designer has run out of room. Look at where the instruments ended up. On the Henschel Hs 129, some of the engine gauges were bolted to the inside faces of the engine nacelles, out in the slipstream,...
Ta 183 Huckebein: Did It Really Become the MiG-15?
Share this story Search for the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 Huckebein and you will find the same sentence over and over: this was the aircraft that became the MiG-15. The swept wing, the nose intake, the tail carried high on the fin — the Soviets took the drawings home in...
F-14 vs RF-4C: The Tomcat That Shot Down an American Phantom
Share this story The exercise phrase was “red and free”. Every other crew in the Mediterranean that morning understood what it meant: you are cleared to simulate an engagement. Call the shot, do not take it. On 22 September 1987, off Sardinia, a US Navy...
Rafale for Portugal: Dassault Signs a Deal With Portuguese Industry
Share this story There is a scale model of a Rafale on the table between the two men signing. It is a small detail and it is the entire point: the document being signed is not a contract for aircraft. It is a promise about Portuguese factories. On 23 September 2026,...
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