Share this story For most of 2026, Boeing was quietly winning. Through the first four months of the year, the American giant had handed over more jets than its European rival, and it looked as though the comeback story was finally taking shape. Then came May —...
Share this story For decades, America built cruise missiles like fine watches: exquisite, devastating, and so expensive you could only afford a handful. The Rusty Dagger is the opposite philosophy bolted under a wing — cheap, simple, turbojet-powered, and meant...
Share this story Step onto a Lufthansa A321 at Frankfurt this year and you might find yourself aboard a flying time machine. One aircraft in the fleet, registration D-AISZ, wears a design no airline has flown in earnest for half a century: a deep blue cheatline...
Share this story Picture climbing aboard in Los Angeles, settling into a cabin tall enough to stand up straight, and stepping off in Sydney without the aircraft ever touching the ground in between. No fuel stop in Honolulu, no diversion, no second leg. That is the...
Share this story Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the...
Share this story On a grey June morning at the ILA Berlin air show, the most ambitious warplane Europe never built quietly ceased to exist. The Future Combat Air System — FCAS, or SCAF to the French — was meant to give France, Germany and Spain a...
Share this story “I feel the need — the need for speed.” “Talk to me, Goose.” Four decades after Top Gun first lit up the screen, those lines still make grown adults want to sprint to the nearest aircraft carrier. And almost all of them,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov,...
Share this story Picture a small wooden crate, about the size of a car’s trunk, dropped by parachute into a field. A man runs to it, opens it, and pulls out what looks like a deflated grey rubber raft. He works a pump for about five minutes. The shapeless bundle...
Share this story On 20 June 1951, over the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base, test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler did something no pilot had ever done. As his stubby little research jet, the Bell X-5, climbed away from the desert floor, he reached for a...
Share this story On the morning of 28 June 1939, twenty-two extraordinarily lucky people walked down a pier at Port Washington on Long Island and climbed aboard what looked like an ocean liner with wings. Captain R.O.D. Sullivan ran up the four big engines, and the...
Share this story It is the middle of the night somewhere over the Norwegian Sea, and a four-engine turboprop is flying low and slow above the black water. Inside, a Navy flight officer hunches over a screen, watching a pattern of floating microphones he has just...
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