Share this story An aircraft with three quarters the wingspan of an Airbus A320 and the weight of two adults took off from a runway in Saxony-Anhalt on 2 September, flew a wide, careful circuit for seventy minutes, and landed again. It never went higher than 180...
Share this story The Royal Air Force flies several aircraft that it cannot refuel. This is not a secret, and it is not new, but it is faintly absurd, and it has finally produced an answer. In a written answer on 2 September, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and...
Share this story Russia is taking its export fighter to the Egyptian coast next week, and it is bringing something it has never shown anyone. Rostec, the Russian state defence conglomerate, says the Su-57E will fly at the El Alamein International Airshow from 8 to 10...
Share this story A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the...
Share this story Hypersonic weapons have a problem that has nothing to do with physics. They work. They are also so expensive that nobody can afford to fire very many of them, which in a serious war is the same thing as not having them. On 1 September the Air Force...
Share this story On 1 September, a formation of very old, very large aeroplanes settled onto a runway in the Northern Territory of Australia, 4,000 kilometres from the nearest American base and comfortably beyond the reach of most of China’s missile force. That was...
Share this story There is an Airbus A380 sitting in the sun at Tarbes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It has been there since 16 July 2025. It is painted for an airline that has flown four flights in its entire existence, holds no air operator’s certificate, and is...
Share this story For years the standard defence of the F-35 went like this: yes, the development was a nightmare, but the unit price kept falling, and eventually a stealth fighter would cost about what a fourth-generation jet costs. That argument has now run out of...
Share this story Buying more of a good fighter sounds like an easy win. The Pentagon has just published the fine print, and it is a reminder that in defence procurement, doubling an order is never simply a matter of writing a bigger cheque. Earlier this year the U.S....
Share this story At about seven in the morning on 2 September, a grey four-engined Hercules bristling with antennas rolled down the runway at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona and climbed into the desert haze. Its callsign was VOLT01. Six hours later it came...
Share this story A short clip posted to Instagram this week shows something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: a jet-powered combat aircraft, no cockpit, no pilot, settling onto a desert runway on its own. The aircraft is Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury. The...
Share this story Frank Kendall, who served as US Secretary of the Air Force from July 2021 to January 2025, spent three days at the start of September 2026 making the same argument in three places: an opinion piece in The New York Times on 1 September, an interview on...
Recent Comments