In 1975, Switzerland moved a Convair 990 Coronado from Zurich to Lucerne. It took barges, closed roads and a considerable amount of nerve, and the whole country watched. Half a century later, they are seriously proposing to do it again — with something twice the...
Russia brought its new stealth weapons to a sand-coloured airfield on the Egyptian coast this week and, for the first time, let people photograph them. At the El Alamein International Airshow, sitting on the apron in front of a Su-57 Felon, were three air-launched...
The number that matters is 47. That is how many fighters the United States Air Force is short of the minimum Congress wrote into law — not an aspiration, not a target, a statutory floor. And the service has been below it since at least May. The figure surfaced...
Donald Trump does not usually take an interest in the business jet market. On Monday he did, in capital letters, on his own social network, and by Tuesday afternoon Bombardier’s share price had taken a seven per cent hit and a Republican senator from Kansas was...
On Tuesday afternoon, four people sat down in front of the Swiss press in Bern and said the thing that everybody in the country had suspected for two years but nobody in government would confirm. There was never a fixed price for the F-35. The report came from the...
US Central Command struck five Iranian crude oil carriers on Tuesday 8 September 2026 and sank at least one of them, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried twice in two days to hit a US Navy warship with ballistic missiles. Iran answered overnight with a...
For four years the Swiss government told parliament and the public the same thing about its F-35A order: the price was fixed. On Tuesday 8 September 2026 the National Council’s Control Committee published a 95-page report saying that no blanket fixed price was...
At 23:34:49 on the night of 1 July 2002, the collision avoidance system aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M over southern Germany told its crew to climb. Seconds later the air traffic controller told them to descend. They descended. On the Boeing 757 converging with them, the...
In April 1944 a Japanese submarine left Lorient carrying the plans for the most advanced interceptor in the world. It reached Singapore on 14 July. Twelve days later, on its way home, USS Sawfish sank it off the Philippines. A second boat carrying the actual aircraft...
In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won the contract in...
By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel programme all...
Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately, to pull a...
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