France Fires Its New Missile at Supersonic Speed
Share this story High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things...
Raptors Meet Finland’s Stealth Fighters in Arkansas
Share this story Two of the rarest sights in modern air combat shared the same patch of Arkansas sky on 16 June 2026: an F-22 Raptor and an F-35 painted in the markings of the Finnish Air Force, flying wingtip to wingtip. One was built to own the sky; the other to see...
A Pilot Just Flew a Drone From Another Jet
Share this story Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other...
America’s Robot Fighters Cleared for Mass Production
Share this story For decades, “fighter jet” meant a human strapped into a cockpit. On 17 June 2026, the U.S. Air Force quietly ended that monopoly. It signed production contracts for two jet-powered combat aircraft that have no cockpit, no ejection seat,...
The Warplane Germany Built Lopsided on Purpose
Share this story Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes...
Flight 19: The Squadron That Never Came Home
Share this story It was a bright, ordinary afternoon in Florida. At about two o’clock on 5 December 1945, five Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers rumbled off the runway at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation exercise. Fourteen men, a clear sky, a...
How Sweden Saved a Crippled American Spy Plane
Share this story At 75,000 feet over the Baltic Sea, the world is dark blue above and curved below, and the only sound in the cockpit is the hiss of the pressure suit. On the morning of 29 June 1987, that calm ended with a bang.The right engine of Lt. Col. Duane...
The Tiger Gets a New Set of Claws
Share this story The attack helicopter has spent the last few years being written off. Ukraine’s skies, thick with man-portable missiles and cheap drones, have looked like an unkind place for a low, slow gunship. Europe’s answer is not to retire its Tiger — but to...
Japan’s Kaga Is a Carrier Again
Share this story A grey warship longer than three football fields is steaming through the Pacific, and stealth fighters are dropping onto its deck. For most navies that would be unremarkable. For Japan, it is something close to historic — because for eighty years,...
America’s New Air Force One Breaks Cover
Share this story For more than sixty years, “Air Force One” has meant one specific shade of pale blue — the robin’s-egg scheme drawn up for John F. Kennedy in 1962. On 19 June, a different 747 rolled into the light inside a hangar at Joint Base Andrews, and the blue...
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