There is a photograph doing the rounds of a grey twinjet sitting in a hangar in Brazil, wearing markings almost nobody expected to see on an Embraer product: the words UZ AIR FORCE, the registration UK 39010, and roundels in the blue, white and green of Uzbekistan....
On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water. Two people were on board. Neither of them was...
Most fighter contracts that make the news are about metal: airframes, engines, how many and how much. This one is about something you cannot photograph, and it may matter more than any of that. On 10 September 2026, Edgewing — the company actually building the...
There is a particular kind of corporate embarrassment that can only be photographed from an airport perimeter fence. At Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, a handful of nearly new Airbus A321XLRs are parked up with holes where their engines used to be. The engines have not...
At ten to nine on a clear Tuesday morning, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Froling lifted off from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township, Michigan, and turned north. The trees had not started to change yet. It was, by every measure available to him at that...
Jam the satellites and most modern weapons go stupid. That is the whole premise of electronic warfare in 2026, and it is why every air force on earth is quietly panicking about how much of its inventory depends on a faint signal broadcast from 20,000 kilometres up. So...
The safety demonstration had barely finished when the exits it describes were needed in earnest. At 17:24 on Thursday afternoon, easyJet flight U23905 pushed back from Terminal 2 at Milan Malpensa, bound for Prague with 146 passengers aboard. Seven minutes later, on a...
On the morning of 6 August 2026, somewhere in the scrub outside Tan-Tan on Morocco’s Atlantic coast, a fat orange object with stubby wings and a jet engine bolted under its belly rolled forward, lit a rocket booster, and climbed away into a bruised dawn sky. It looked...
In the last week of August, in a village in the Swiss canton of Glarus, a small grey helicopter with no one inside it lifted off, flew a profile, and landed again. It did this five more times, in six different airframes. Painted on the side of each one, under a naval...
The document that finally broke a thirty-year deadlock does not mention Emirates. It does not mention Berlin either. It speaks, in the flat register of diplomacy, of an additional fifth point in the route schedule for a national carrier of the United Arab Emirates....
On an August night over North Dakota, a four-engine transport aircraft crosses the city of Minot at about the height of a tall office block, in the dark, with two steel booms poking out of the doors where paratroopers normally jump. It is not delivering anything. It...
A signature in a museum is not a fighter order. It is worth holding on to that distinction this week, because the two things are already being folded into one another. On 9 September 2026, at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control...
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