A ramjet has no moving parts and no way of starting itself. It works by ramming air into a duct so fast that the compression alone is enough to burn fuel usefully, which means that at zero knots on a runway it is an expensively shaped tube of nothing. Something else...
Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled flights, a week-long...
The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab announced that...
Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation, and until...
The plan was to take off at 8:15 in the morning, roughly the minute United 175 left Boston Logan, and to be over United’s Flight Training Center at 9:03, the exact minute that aircraft struck the South Tower. A Boeing 777 in United colours, escorted by four F-16...
Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code 35+01. Lockheed...
For seven months of this war, the pattern at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base has been the same. Iran fires. Patriots answer. Jordan and CENTCOM announce that the interception rate was high, the base is operational, and everyone is fine. Tehran claims devastation. Nobody...
The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings level, still low....
On 20 May 2023, in a hotel ballroom in Reno, a 75-year-old man finished telling a story he had told several hundred times, stepped away from the lectern, and collapsed. There were doctors in the audience. He died at the hospital that night. Brian Shul had spent thirty...
The question being asked in Bern this afternoon is not whether the F-35 procurement went wrong. That is settled. It is whether anyone will personally pay for it. A day after the oversight committee reported that Switzerland never had a fixed price for its F-35As, the...
On 19 February 1928, a 20-year-old German woman climbed into the cockpit of a Junkers F.13 named Kiek in die Welt — Berlin dialect for “look in the world” — and flew it for Lufthansa. She is generally credited as the first woman anywhere hired...
On the morning of 20 April 1933, in the Tanezrouft, Bill Lancaster took out a fuel card and wrote what he knew would be his last message. He had been down in the Sahara for eight days. He had no water left. Exactly one year earlier, to the day, a man called Haden...
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