Share this story Paraguay has not flown a jet combat aircraft since 2003, when the last Aermacchi-derived AT-26 Xavantes were retired. It has never flown a supersonic one. Now it is looking at a country 18,000 kilometres away that has just retired the largest fleet of...
Share this story Some aeroplanes shout. The Percival Mew Gull whispered — a slip of a thing, barely twenty feet long, its wings not much wider than a family car, built almost entirely of wood and glue in a shed at Gravesend. You could have mistaken it for a toy....
Share this story On 24 May 1928, a silver airship called the Italia circled the top of the world. Below her lay the North Pole, and her crew dropped an Italian flag, a banner from Milan and a small wooden cross onto the endless white. It was a triumph. It should have...
Share this story Somewhere over the Channel, in a slick of oil and cold grey swell, a fighter pilot is treading water and losing the argument with hypothermia. He hears it before he sees it: a slow, clattering drone, an aeroplane that looks less like it is flying and...
Share this story She was small, blonde and twenty-one, and she kept flowers in the cockpit. Not as a joke, not for a photograph — for herself. Somewhere over the churned earth of the Mius Front, in a Yak-1 with a pale lily painted near the nose, Lydia Litvyak...
Share this story On a summer morning in 2024, thousands of people lined the shores of Vancouver Island to say goodbye to a 79-year-old giant. The Hawaii Mars, the largest flying boat still in the air anywhere in the world, lifted off the water one last time, escorted...
Share this story In the last spring of the Second World War, Dutch children ran into the open fields as British bombers roared overhead, not to hide, but to wave. Because these Lancasters were not carrying bombs. They were raining down bread, tinned meat and chocolate...
Share this story As choking smoke spreads over Borneo, Indonesia is fighting fire with the weather itself. On Aug. 21, 2026, five more Indonesian Air Force aircraft lifted off from Abdulrachman Saleh Air Base in Malang, bound for the burning provinces of West and East...
Share this story On Aug. 18, 2026, off the Goto Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japanese fighter pilots were sent up to shadow an unusual pair drifting across the East China Sea. One was a Chinese Y-9 electronic-warfare aircraft. The other had no one aboard at all: a...
Share this story On the morning of 25 October 1999, a small charter jet lifted off from Orlando bound for Dallas. It was an ordinary hop for six ordinary reasons, a golfer, his agents, a course designer, and two pilots, all with places to be. Within minutes, something...
Share this story Breaking — The US Navy is internally weighing whether to rename the future aircraft carrier CVN-81, currently designated the future USS Doris Miller, and could potentially name it after President Donald Trump, CNN reported on 20 August 2026 in an...
Share this story Above the Sea of Japan the air was thin and lethally cold, the clouds below him packed like dirty cotton. It was Royce Williams’ second flight of the day, 18 November 1952, and his Grumman Panther was clawing past 12,000 feet when the radio...
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