The Sopwith Camel: Deadly to the Enemy, Deadlier to Novices
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
Embraer Wants to Fire Cruise Missiles Off a Cargo Ramp
Share this story Here is a cheap way to terrify a naval planner: take an ordinary cargo plane, roll a pallet of cruise missiles out the back, and let them fly themselves to the target. The US Air Force has been perfecting that trick for years under the name Rapid...
Poland’s First Home-Built F-35 Takes to the Air
Share this story Poland’s stealth fighter has, until now, been an American export — built in Fort Worth, Texas, and flown across the Atlantic. This week that changed. The first Polish F-35A assembled in Europe, at Leonardo’s final-assembly line in...
Archer and Anduril Unveil Halo, a Pilotless Cargo Aircraft
Share this story Archer Aviation spent years promising to fly you across a city in a whisper-quiet electric air taxi. At Farnborough this week it revealed something rather different: a pilotless, hybrid-electric tiltrotor built with the defence-technology firm...
Britain Names Its First Combat Drone: Brontanax
Share this story The reveal came without a flypast, without a scream of afterburner. On the second day of the Farnborough International Airshow, BAE Systems pulled a cover from a matt-grey, tailless aircraft roughly the size of a Hawk trainer and gave Britain its...
Did China Crash a US Spy Plane on Purpose?
Share this story On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell...
The Corner of the Sky That Kills Both Ways
Share this story There is a place in the sky where flying too slow will kill you and flying too fast will kill you — and the gap between the two can be narrower than the length of a bus. Pilots call it the coffin corner, and it is one of the strangest, most...
Farnborough’s $28 Billion Opening Act
Share this story Every couple of years, the aviation industry decamps to a former airfield in Hampshire and spends a week trying to out-announce itself. Farnborough 2026 is no exception — and by the close of the second day, the scoreboard had already ticked past...
Six Flags, One Submarine Hunter
Share this story Hunting a submarine is a team sport. This year, at the world’s largest naval exercise, the team stopped stopping at national borders — and started sharing the same aircraft.For the first time at RIMPAC, the U.S. Navy is flying mixed...
Golden Eagles Cross the Arafura Sea
Share this story The message came from Air Operations Command in Jakarta, and for the ninety-five men and women of Skadron Udara 15 it meant something none of them had done before: pack up five jets, cross the Arafura Sea, and go fly with the world.For the first time,...
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