Riyadh Air Wants the Bigger Dreamliner
Share this story The first big order of Farnborough 2026 landed before most of the stands had finished setting up. Riyadh Air, the Saudi carrier that flew its first paying passenger barely three weeks ago, spent Monday morning committing to 34 more widebody aircraft...
Three Drones, One Apache, Triple the Missiles
Share this story The model sitting under the lights on Anduril’s stand at Farnborough on Monday morning does not look like anything currently in the US Army inventory. It has two enormous tilting rotors, a fuselage shaped like a stretched teardrop, and where a...
What Is Flying at Farnborough This Week
Share this story The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a...
The New Air Force One Is Going Back In
Share this story A reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Sunday evening asked President Trump a direct question: the Qatari jet he is now flying as Air Force One does not have antimissile defences, so why is he flying it? The answer confirmed what aviation and security...
The Drones Are Coming to Red Flag
Share this story 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...
What Happened at Muwaffaq Salti
Share this story 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...
The RAF’s Newest Jet Is Bright Green
Share this story 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...
The Transport That Became a Jammer
Share this story 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...
The Wild Weasels Barely Unpacked
Share this story 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...
Germany Joins a French Nuclear Exercise
Share this story 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...
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