Share this story On 1 January 2000, several thousand perfectly airworthy jet airliners were scheduled to become illegal. Not unsafe. Not worn out. Simply too loud for the country they were registered in. What saved most of them was a muffler. An entire industry grew...
Share this story On 31 October 1974, two identical jets took off for the first time on the same day, in two different countries. One left Batajnica, near Belgrade. The other left Bacău, in Romania. The timing was deliberate: for political reasons, the two first...
Share this story On Sunday 15 June 2025, thousands of people packed the beaches of the Mar Menor in Murcia to watch seven red-and-yellow jets trail the colours of the Spanish flag one last time. King Felipe VI was among them. The Patrulla Águila was flying its...
Share this story On the morning of 6 November 1981, two South African Air Force jets were scrambled from Ondangwa to intercept a pair of Angolan MiG-21s. The missiles would not guide. So Major Johan Rankin closed in and shot one of the MiGs down with his 30 mm cannon....
Share this story Portugal is shopping for a new fighter, but first it has to keep the old one flying. At its meeting on Wednesday 11 November, the Portuguese Council of Ministers approved a resolution allowing the Portuguese Air Force to spend up to €12 million...
Share this story Sweden built the Gripen to be cheap to fly and easy to turn around on a road base. Its own budget now says the fleet is not flying enough. The 2027 budget bill, handed to the Riksdag on Thursday 12 November, shows that the Swedish Air Force logged...
Share this story Four were already agreed. Now Prague is talking about twelve more. On Wednesday 11 November, Czech Industry and Trade Minister Karel Havlíček told reporters in Kyiv that the Czech Republic could supply Ukraine with up to 16 Aero L-39 Skyfox...
Share this story At half past two in the morning on 10 May 1940, eleven twin-boom fighters stood on Waalhaven airfield outside Rotterdam with their engines already running. They were Fokker G.1s, the heaviest fighters the Netherlands had. Ninety minutes later, Heinkel...
Share this story In the winter of 1940, Finnish fighter pilots were taking off from a frozen lake. Their aircraft had been designed in Turin for the Mediterranean, shipped in pieces across a continent at war, and assembled in the snow. It had an open cockpit, two...
Share this story When the Allies wrote the terms that ended the First World War, they listed what Germany had to hand over in round numbers: 5,000 guns, 25,000 machine guns, 3,000 trench mortars, 1,700 aeroplanes. Not one gun or mortar was named by type. Then, in...
Share this story At 22:55 the last scheduled arrival touches down at Zurich. At 23:30 the airport goes quiet, and for the next six and a half hours any aircraft that wants to land or take off needs a special permit. In the towns around it, people sleep. The half-hour...
Share this story By the mid-1980s, SR-71 Blackbirds were flying regular reconnaissance tracks over the Barents Sea, photographing and listening to the Soviet Northern Fleet around Murmansk from international airspace. For two decades nothing the Soviet Union could...
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