Share this story At 10:43 on 7 December 1936, a radio operator somewhere over the South Atlantic tapped out a short line of Morse from the flying boat Croix-du-Sud: “Coupons moteur arrière droit” – cutting the rear starboard engine. Then the...
Share this story On 24 November 1955 a high-winged prototype registered PH-NIV took to the air for the first time. It had two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, a pressurised cabin and an airframe in which much of the metal was glued together rather than riveted. According...
Share this story Melun-Villaroche, 28 September 1952. Kostia Rozanoff, Dassault’s chief test pilot, lifts a silver prototype off the runway and stays aloft for 25 minutes. In level flight the new jet touches Mach 0.92, comfortably beyond what its designers had...
Share this story The Austrian Airlines A320 was two hours out of Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, with 51 passengers in the cabin and Vienna still more than an hour away, when the crew received the message every airline crew dreads: a bomb threat against their flight. They...
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...
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...
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....
Share this story In the mid-1950s Dassault built a small strike jet that nobody wanted. The French Air Force was not interested, and neither were the NATO air forces it had been pitched to. Then the French Navy took a look at a bigger, more powerful version, and...
Share this story Ask a Patrouille de France pilot about the jet they fly, and you may get an unexpectedly modest answer. They all come from the Rafale or the Mirage 2000, one of them told British forces broadcaster BFBS this year, and by comparison the little red,...
Share this story On 4 July 1986, a white delta-winged jet with canards and two American engines lifted off from Istres in the south of France. Test pilot Guy Mitaux-Maurouard climbed to 11,000 metres and pushed it to Mach 1.3 on its very first flight, which lasted...
Share this story France has made up its mind. The fighter that will one day replace the Rafale will be French, designed and built at home, with partners invited only on France’s terms. General Jérôme Bellanger, chief of staff of the French Air and...
Share this story In early 1942, a pilot flying over Burbank, California, would have seen rows of houses, trees, lawns and a few parked cars. Underneath, thousands of people were building warplanes. The suburb was made of canvas, netting, chicken wire and paint, and...
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