The Airlift That Saved Israel in 1973
On the evening of 14 October 1973, a C-5A Galaxy touched down at Lod airport outside Tel Aviv carrying 97 tons of 105 mm howitzer shells. Roughly a hundred miles to the south-west, the largest tank battle since Kursk was being fought, and the Israeli army was running...
Every Robot Wingman Unveiled This Week
Walk the halls at Farnborough this week and you will trip over robot aeroplanes. Anduril unveiled a tiltrotor on Monday morning. BAE and Lockheed unveiled a jammer an hour or two later. Boeing parked an Australian one on the static line. General Atomics brought its...
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...
The Drone Was Already Down
The drone had already been shot down. That is the detail that makes this loss different from the others. On Saturday, in northern Iraq, a US service member was killed during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance recovered from a downed Iranian one-way attack...
Israel Built a Jet That Attacks With Noise
Most combat aircraft announced at airshows are defined by what they carry. Israel Aerospace Industries spent Monday introducing one defined by what it broadcasts. ELLYON has no bomb bay and no missile rails. Its weapon is a wideband electronically scanned jammer, and...
Sweden Wants Twelve More Gripens Back
Sweden is giving Ukraine a fighter fleet. At Farnborough this week, the head of the Swedish Air Force explained how Sweden intends to avoid ending up smaller as a result. Major General Jonas Wikman told Breaking Defense that a further batch of twelve Gripen E fighters...
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 Drone Built by Two Secret Labs
Skunk Works and FalconWorks are the two most secretive advanced-projects shops in Western aerospace. Lockheed Martin’s built the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117. BAE Systems’ is the British equivalent, the place where the awkward, classified and interesting...
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...
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