Share this story Two hours out of Rome, somewhere over the south-east of England, Alaska Airlines flight 181 turned around. The Boeing 787-9 had left Fiumicino at 15:45 on Sunday afternoon bound for Seattle, climbed to 34,000 feet and headed north-west across France....
Share this story When the Royal Air Force retired its last Reaper in the autumn of 2025, it did so with a gap in the middle of its capability. The replacement was already flying — the Protector RG Mk 1, sixteen of them on order — but it could not yet legally drop or...
Share this story On 9 July, eight Iranian ballistic missiles were fired at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. All eight were intercepted. Nobody was hurt, nothing was damaged, and the incident barely registered outside the region. Eight days later the same base was...
Share this story There is an aircraft in most modern strike packages that carries no bombs, has no air-to-air kills, and will never appear on a recruiting poster. It is usually converted from something else, it is frequently ugly, and if it fails, everyone else dies....
Share this story At 2005 on 17 May 1987, the guided missile frigate USS Stark was told that an Iraqi aircraft had left the mainland and was heading south down the Persian Gulf. This was not alarming. Iraqi aircraft did this most nights, hunting tankers carrying...
Share this story On 28 May 2017, a photographer at Miho Air Base in western Japan took a picture of a Kawasaki C-2 transport, tail number 68-1203. It was an unremarkable aeroplane doing an unremarkable thing: a high-winged, T-tailed freighter on a ramp, clean-lined...
Share this story It looked like the future had landed on a dry lakebed in California: a needle-nosed, stiletto-slim jet built entirely for speed, sheathed in titanium, designed to cruise at twice the speed of sound. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was the sleekest research...
Share this story In the film Captain America, the villain escapes aboard a sleek, tailless flying wing. It looks like science fiction. It is not entirely invented: the design is lifted almost directly from a real German aircraft that flew in the last winter of the...
Share this story In 1939 the U.S. Army Air Corps did something unusual: it asked American industry to forget everything it knew about what a fighter should look like. The result included one of the strangest warplanes the country ever flew — a fighter with its...
Share this story When Russia rolled a sleek single-engine stealth fighter onto the tarmac at the 2021 MAKS air show — complete with an aggressive marketing blitz and a signature perfume — the Su-75 Checkmate looked like Moscow’s answer to the F-35. Five years later,...
Share this story A carrier is only as capable as the people who work its deck. On 14 July 2026, the People’s Liberation Army Navy released imagery that made this point plainly: J-15-family fighters running full-cycle takeoff and landing training on land, methodically...
Share this story At 34 minutes past the hour on 14 July, a single-seat Eurofighter in plain grey primer rolled down the runway at Airbus’s Manching site in Bavaria, lit its two EJ200 engines and climbed away. The aircraft carried the German military registration...
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