On the afternoon of 6 April 1965, test pilot Roland “Bee” Beamont was having lunch at a pub near Boscombe Down when the BBC news bulletin came through the radio. Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan, midway through his Budget Speech in the House of...
When the Patrouille de France’s nine blue-and-white Alphajets sweep over the Champs-Élysées on July 14, they won’t be alone. Flanking them will be two Mirage 2000Bs crewed by Franco-Ukrainian teams — the opening act of the largest Bastille Day aerial...
Share this story It is now firm. Saab has signed a contract for 16 Gripen E fighters destined for Ukraine — turning the spring’s letter of intent into a binding deal and committing one of the West’s most capable light fighters to the Ukrainian Air...
Share this story At 1:54pm on June 30, a Bulgarian MiG-29 lit its afterburners and clawed off the runway at Graf Ignatievo. Three minutes later it had formed up on the wing of a civilian Airbus A320 that had just transmitted the four digits every air-defence...
Share this story It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky,...
Share this story At Frankfurt Airport, the busiest cargo gateway in Europe, Lufthansa Cargo has switched on the first piece of a €600 million bet on automation. The centrepiece is a warehouse 42 metres tall that, for the most part, runs itself.The new fully...
The Germans had a word for it. They always do. When Luftwaffe pilots talked about the Panavia Tornado, they called it the eierlegende Wollmilchsau — the “egg-laying wool-milk pig.” A mythical creature that does everything: lays eggs, produces wool, gives...
Share this story Before dawn on 14 June, two Royal Air Force Chinook helicopters thundered low over the English Channel toward a 244-metre oil tanker flying the flag of Cameroon. Hanging beneath them, silhouetted against the first grey light, were Royal Marines from...
Share this story For more than six decades, every fighter jet in the Algerian Air Force has come from one country: Russia. MiG-21s, MiG-25s, Su-30MKAs, MiG-29s — the entire combat fleet reads like a catalogue of Soviet and Russian design bureaux. That era is about to...
Share this story Two hundred miles from the nearest NATO border, Serbia is building an air defence network that Beijing designed and no Western alliance approved. On 28 June, President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed what defence analysts had suspected for months: Belgrade...
Share this story It is the morning of 28 March 1910, and a thin mist still clings to the Étang de Berre, the great salt lagoon west of Marseille. A 27-year-old engineer named Henri Fabre sits astride a slender wooden beam, perched above three flat floats that bob...
Share this story It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console,...
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