Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different engines, was...
Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the far side of a...
The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the sea east of...
Star Alliance has 25-odd member airlines and access to more than a thousand airport lounges around the world. It owns six of them. Six, in twenty-nine years: Los Angeles, Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Buenos Aires Ezeiza, Rio de Janeiro Galeão,...
Somewhere in San Diego there were two MQ-9A Reapers that nobody had bought. They are Italian now. A note on the pictures: no photograph of an Italian Air Force MQ-9 is available under a licence we can use, so the aircraft shown here are US Air Force Reapers of the...
Japan is 6,800 islands long. Defending that coastline with crewed fighters means either an air force it cannot afford or gaps it cannot accept. Which is why Tokyo is now designing a coastal defence concept built around uncrewed aircraft — and why every large...
At 15:55 this afternoon, a Boeing 787-9 in a deep indigo livery touched down at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and an hour and a half later it went back the way it came. Flight RX0873 from Riyadh, inbound. RX0874 to Riyadh, outbound. Every day from now on. Riyadh...
The NH90 has one of the worst reputations in modern military aviation. Australia binned its 46 of them a decade early. Norway walked away. Sweden is phasing its out by 2027. Belgium and Finland are not fans. The type has become shorthand for a European procurement...
It looks like a rifle, weighs less than five pounds, and you can teach somebody to work it in under five minutes. Pacific Air Forces wants sixty of them. It does not, at present, have the money to pay for them. On 8 September 2026, PACAF’s 18th Contracting...
In November 2024, the United States sent two B-52H bombers to fly over the Bahrain International Airshow. One of them then parked on the static display, the first time a B-52 had done so at Sakhir. Nobody pretended it was a routine appearance. It was a message to...
The problem with the FPV attack drone — the weapon that has defined three years of fighting in Ukraine — is that it needs a pilot. Not a technician, a pilot: somebody who can fly a fast, twitchy quadcopter into a moving target through a laggy video feed,...
On Monday morning a white and red turboprop lifted off from Buochs, the airfield tucked under the mountains next to Pilatus’s factory in Stans, and flew a first sortie over central Switzerland. It carried the Swiss test registration HB-HCA and construction...
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