Pegasus Bridge: Six Gliders, No Engines, One Pass
Share this story At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, a wooden glider carrying twenty-eight men hit the ground at over ninety miles an hour, tore through barbed wire, and stopped about fifty yards from a bridge over the Caen Canal. It had been cast off from a bomber at 7,000 feet...
B-21 Raider: Whiteman Gets a $74.8M Signature-Test Hangar
Share this story You can learn a surprising amount about a secret aeroplane from the buildings people put up for it. On 10 September 2026, the US Army Corps of Engineers awarded Conti Federal Services a $74.8 million contract to build a radio frequency and...
Saab Takes SEK 2.9 Billion to Design Sweden’s Next Fighter
Share this story Sweden has roughly ten million people and builds its own fighter aircraft. It has done so, without interruption, since the 1940s. That is a peculiar and slightly improbable national habit, and on 9 September 2026 Stockholm quietly paid to keep it...
USAF Awards $149M for Bunker Buster Warhead Cases
Share this story The most expensive part of the biggest conventional bomb in the American inventory is not the explosive. It is the pipe it lives in. On 10 September 2026 the US Air Force awarded a combined $149 million to four companies to keep making those pipes:...
Hermeus Ramjet-X: A Ramjet Dropped From a Drone at Mach 3
Share this story A ramjet has no moving parts and no way of starting itself. It works by ramming air into a duct so fast that the compression alone is enough to burn fuel usefully, which means that at zero knots on a runway it is an expensively shaped tube of nothing....
Netherlands Signs for One Saab GlobalEye, Shared With Sweden
Share this story The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab...
Novy Urengoy: Ukraine’s Deepest Drone Strike of the War
Share this story Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation,...
Germany’s First F-35A: 35+01 Flies at Fort Worth
Share this story Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code...
Muwaffaq Salti: Iran Damaged a US A-10 and Eight F-15Es
Share this story For seven months of this war, the pattern at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has been the same. Iran fires. Patriots answer. Jordan and CENTCOM announce that the interception rate was high, the base is operational, and everyone is fine. Tehran claims...
Minimum Interval Takeoff: B-52s Twelve Seconds Apart
Share this story The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings...
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