The Drones Are Coming to Red Flag
Every argument about autonomous combat aircraft eventually arrives at the same question, and it is not a technical one. It is whether the person in the cockpit will trust the thing flying off their wing. Frank Kendall, who ran the US Air Force as its Secretary from...
What Happened at Muwaffaq Salti
The air base is named after a man who died in an aeroplane. Lieutenant Muwaffaq Salti was a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, killed in combat with Israeli fighters on 13 November 1966 during the Battle of Samu. Jordan gave his name to the base at Azraq, out in the...
The RAF’s Newest Jet Is Bright Green
If you happened to be at Birmingham Airport on the afternoon of 15 July, you would have seen something that looked like a mistake: a Boeing 737 with a large rectangular fin bolted to its spine, painted an unlovely metallic green, climbing out over the West Midlands....
The Transport That Became a Jammer
On 28 May 2017, a photographer at Miho Air Base in western Japan took a picture of a Kawasaki C-2 transport, tail number 68-1203. It was an unremarkable aeroplane doing an unremarkable thing: a high-winged, T-tailed freighter on a ramp, clean-lined and entirely...
The Wild Weasels Barely Unpacked
Two weeks ago the story was aircraft going home. Raptors leaving the Gulf for England, squadrons rotating out, a ceasefire holding well enough that the US Air Force felt comfortable thinning out its presence in the region. That lasted about as long as it took to write...
Germany Joins a French Nuclear Exercise
On the morning of 16 July, two French Rafales and two Luftwaffe Eurofighter Typhoons met in European airspace and took fuel from a French A330 Phenix tanker. No weapons were carried. The manoeuvres were unremarkable. Any air force in NATO does this on a quiet Tuesday....
A Startup Just Won $500M to Flood the Army With FPV Drones
Three years ago, Neros was two former teenage drone racers in a workshop. This week the U.S. Army handed the startup a contract worth up to $500 million to build first-person-view attack drones — the cheap, expendable weapons that have rewritten the rules of war in...
No Robot at the Controls: The B-21 Keeps Two Pilots
For years, one of the more futuristic rumours about America’s new stealth bomber was that it might not need much of a crew at all — that the B-21 Raider could fly with a single pilot, or eventually none. This month the Air Force put that speculation to rest with a...
America’s $175 Billion “Golden Dome” Gets Its General
The most expensive defence project in American history now has a single name attached to it. On 17 July 2026, the Senate confirmed Space Force General Michael A. Guetlein to run Golden Dome — President Trump’s plan to throw a missile shield over the entire United...
Britain’s Tankers Can’t Refuel Its Own Spy Planes
Britain owns a fleet of the most capable aerial tankers on the market — and cannot use them to refuel some of its own most important aircraft. It is one of the quiet embarrassments of the Royal Air Force, and after fifteen years the RAF has finally said out loud that...
Recent Comments