Diehl Defence and Polaris flew the Cobra 600 for the first time on 22 August. It carries one IRIS-T missile 250 miles and lets a ground radar take the shot.
The Ejection Seats Britain Wouldn’t Sell
Argentina bought five Super Etendards from France in 2018. They never flew a sortie, because Britain would not release the ejection-seat cartridges.
He Got It to Base, Then Ejected
A Hungarian Gripen went down near Szolnok on 24 August. The 51-year-old pilot steered it onto military ground before ejecting, and broke his back doing it.
Italy Said No to Drone Killers. Then It Bought 5,031.
In June 2025, an Italian Air Force spokesperson told Janes that Italy was not looking at acquiring any mission-specific systems to counter drones. On 21 August 2026, the US State Department approved the sale to Italy of 5,031 laser guidance kits designed to turn cheap...
A Drone That Carries Its Own Strike Team
In February we covered Turkey pairing its KAAN fighter with two ANKA III stealth drones, in Turkey Pairs the KAAN With Two Robot Wingmen. A crewed fighter commanding uncrewed ones is now a familiar idea. On 14 August, Turkish Aerospace posted flight imagery of...
Ukraine Went Back to Taneco Ten Days Later
On 10 August, Ukrainian drones hit the Taneco refinery at Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan, 1,200 kilometres from Ukraine. We covered it in Ukraine Hits Russia’s Deepest Refinery Yet. Ten days later they went back and hit it again. That is the part worth paying...
The Navy Promised an Answer in August
In April, the Chief of Naval Operations said the Navy would name the winner of the F/A-XX competition in August. The Defense Secretary said August. The Acting Navy Secretary said August. There is now one week of August left, and no announcement. We covered the...
Europe Built One Submarine Hunter From Scratch
Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet Atlantic is the...
Sixty-Five Years On, Nobody Has Beaten It
The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany chose it in 2022...
Sweden’s Forgotten Middle Child
Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a stretch of forest...
The Bomber That Won by Being Good Enough
In the autumn of 1982, eight Soviet bombers came down on the USS Enterprise and USS Midway in the North Pacific and locked their radars on both carriers from about 190 kilometres out. The US Navy’s response was deliberately restrained, because watching how they...
The Airlifter That Outlived the Union That Built It
In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is still in...
France Kept the Jets. Israel Built Its Own.
In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would not have...
Only You Can Prevent a Forest
Four twin-engined transports fly line abreast, eighty metres apart, a hundred and fifty feet above the canopy. Behind each one a white plume spreads and settles into the trees. The run takes about four and a half minutes and covers sixteen kilometres. The crews called...
The MiG That American Pilots Were Scared Of
More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first with a real...
The Last Dogfight Between Propeller Fighters
On 17 July 1969, a Honduran captain in a twenty-five-year-old Corsair shot down three Salvadoran aircraft in a single day. Nobody has done anything like it since, and nobody ever will. Fernando Soto Henríquez was flying the last air-to-air combat between...
The Short Little Ugly Fellow That Never Missed
The catapult fires and the deck drops away. It is January 1968, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the aeroplane clawing off the bow of USS Ranger is short, blunt-nosed and faintly ridiculous next to the sleek fighters parked behind it. The crews call it the SLUF. Short Little...