Share this story The boarding music is still playing when it drifts down the aisle: a stale, cheesy, slightly chemical smell. Crews have a name for it. They call it “dirty socks”, sometimes “wet dog”. Most passengers wrinkle their noses and...
EAA Aviation Museum Adds Six Aircraft, From Seattle II to a PBY
Share this story A flying boat that sank U-boats off Iceland. A homebuilt biplane that took one Washington State couple more than a decade. A powered hang glider that lifted off a frozen Wisconsin lake in 1975 and started a movement. They now share a roof in Oshkosh....
Blue Angels and Thunderbirds Fill NAS Jacksonville
Share this story Some fans set alarms for 3:30 a.m. Others crawled through three hours of traffic and then parked on the roadside, hoping the tow trucks had the weekend off. By just after 1 p.m. on Saturday, Naval Air Station Jacksonville announced it was full. The...
Germany Drops Direct MQ-28 Ghost Bat Purchase
Share this story Seven months ago it was the front-runner. In March, Rheinmetall and Boeing signed up to bring the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to Germany; in June, it was shown at ILA Berlin with a bigger wing and new German partners. This week Berlin quietly took it off the...
Belgium Raises F-16 Pledge: Ten Jets for Ukraine
Share this story Two weeks ago the number was three. On Thursday evening in Brussels, over a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the EU summit, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever more than tripled it. Belgium, he said, will hand Ukraine ten F-16 fighters before...
Boeing 737 MAX 10: FAA Poised to Certify the Biggest MAX
Share this story Boeing rolled its longest 737 out of the Renton factory in November 2019. Nearly seven years later, the jet still lacks the one thing it needs to carry a paying passenger: an FAA type certificate. That wait may now be measured in days. On Friday, 16...
Mi-28NM Hit Again: Ukraine Claims a Second Havoc in a Week
Share this story The camera is mounted on a small fixed-wing drone, and it is chasing a helicopter. A camouflaged Russian Mi-28NM fills more of the frame with every second as the drone closes from behind and slightly above, lined up on the engine bay. Then the video...
RAF Drone Near-Misses: Mystery Objects Buzz a Voyager and Typhoon
Share this story Sixteen thousand feet above the North Sea, 32 nautical miles north-north-east of Cromer, an RAF Voyager tanker was passing fuel to a Typhoon on 18 February 2026. Then something black and circular flashed towards the windscreen and passed 100 to 150...
HMS Prince of Wales Sails for the High North With F-35Bs
Share this story Families lined the Round Tower in Old Portsmouth on Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out of harbour. The 65,000-tonne carrier, Britain's biggest warship, was due to leave at 17:00, weather permitting, and the...
Edelweiss A340 HB-JMC: Gear Fault Turns Punta Cana Flight Back
Share this story Ten minutes out of Zurich, a fully fuelled Airbus A340 bound for the Caribbean stops climbing and starts drawing circles in the sky north of Aarau. Somewhere beneath the fuselage, one set of wheels has refused to fold away. For the crew of Edelweiss...
Saudi AH-6i Helicopter Crash in Najran: Two Officers Killed
Share this story Two Saudi officers are dead, and there are two versions of how they died. In one, their small attack helicopter suffered a technical failure and fell out of the sky near the Yemeni border. In the other, a Houthi weapon brought it down. On Sunday 18...
Lithuania Drone Incident: Suspected Drone Explodes, Not Shot Down
Share this story Somewhere over northern Lithuania, early on Sunday morning, something exploded. A driver on the road from Biržai toward Pasvalys heard the bang, and debris struck the door of a moving car. Nobody was hurt, but air raid alerts had sent people across...
Romanian F-16s Shoot Down Two Geran Jet Drones Off Sulina
Share this story The sun was going down over the Danube Delta when the radar picture filled with targets. A group of aircraft was moving southwest across the Black Sea, about 120 kilometres east of Snake Island, on a course that pointed straight at the Romanian coast....
FAA 1,500-Hour Rule: How US Airline Pilots Actually Get Hired
Share this story Ask anyone in American aviation how you get hired by an airline and you will be given a number. Fifteen hundred hours. It is the single best-known figure in the industry, it is quoted as though it were a law of physics, and almost every part of it is...
Part 103 Ultralight Helicopters: The 254-Pound Problem
Share this story There is a helicopter you can buy, fly away from your own field, and operate in American airspace without a pilot certificate, without a medical, without registration, and without any airworthiness approval whatsoever. It is not a loophole and it is...
Neel Kearby: Six Kills Over Wewak and the Medal of Honor
On 11 October 1943 Col. Neel Kearby led four P-47 Thunderbolts into nearly fifty Japanese aircraft over Wewak and was credited with six kills, then a USAAF record for one mission. He won the Medal of Honor, scored 22 victories and was killed near the same airfield five months later.
F-35 Sensor Fusion: How Three Sensors Become One Track
Radar gives range and no identity. Infrared gives bearing and no range. Deciding that both describe one aeroplane is the whole of sensor fusion, and the Pentagon test record shows how hard it was.