Share this story We have watched this particular aeroplane twice already: once when it went into the paint shop in August, and again when it flew for the first time on 10 September. On Friday, Lockheed Martin rolled 35+01 out under the lights at Fort Worth and...
Share this story At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this...
Share this story Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside...
Share this story On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about,...
Share this story Lufthansa has spent forty years as one of the most reliably Airbus-shaped airlines in Europe. On Wednesday evening its supervisory board signed off on twenty more Boeings — and specifically on the biggest 737 ever built. The Lufthansa Group is...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week,...
Share this story Russian-registered aircraft have been banned from European Union airspace since 2022. On the morning of 16 September, one landed in Germany anyway, with permission, and with the German foreign ministry explaining why. At 09:36 an Ilyushin Il-96-300 in...
Share this story Somewhere over the North Atlantic, in late 1973 or early 1974, a US Air Force F-4C Phantom flew a barrel roll around a Soviet Tu-95 Bear. The Soviet crew had asked for it, by hand signal, through the glass. The photographs were taken by Robert M....
Share this story Air France 4590 lifted off from runway 26 Right at Charles de Gaulle at 16:43 on Tuesday 25 July 2000, already on fire, and hit a hotel at Gonesse about seventy seconds later. Everyone aboard died — 100 passengers and nine crew — along...
Share this story Britain spent the 1950s building three superb bombers and then discovered it had nothing worth putting in them. The Vulcan, the Victor and the Valiant were designed to fly over the Soviet Union and drop free-fall bombs. By the time they were in...
Share this story Europe has spent three years arguing about whether it should build its own fighters or keep buying American ones. The answer taking shape is neither, and it is not really about fighters at all. At the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space...
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