Share this story The Netherlands bought the MQ-9 Reaper in 2011 as a pair of eyes. No weapons, no requirement for them, no intention of adding any. For fifteen years that held. On Thursday 20 August 2026, a Royal Netherlands Air Force MQ-9A took off from Leeuwarden...
Share this story Paraguay has not flown a jet combat aircraft since 2003, when the last Aermacchi-derived AT-26 Xavantes were retired. It has never flown a supersonic one. Now it is looking at a country 18,000 kilometres away that has just retired the largest fleet of...
Share this story In July 2025 the United States approved the sale of nine HH-60W Jolly Green II combat rescue helicopters to Norway. It was a specialised, expensive, superbly capable machine built for one demanding job: going into hostile territory to bring downed...
Share this story For years the U.S. Navy has had a problem it could not shoot its way out of. Its best long-range air-to-air missile, the AIM-174B Gunslinger, is a magnificent weapon that only the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet can carry, and only hanging off a wing where...
Share this story Here is a puzzle. A modern fighter jet is designed to fly something like 8,000 hours before its airframe is worn out. And yet, across NATO, air forces routinely retire their fighters long before they reach that limit — parking perfectly flyable...
Share this story Ukraine is not only buying Western fighters — it wants to build them. The contracts Kyiv has signed for Gripen and Rafale jets include provisions to localise their production and maintenance inside Ukraine, the country’s Air Force aviation...
Share this story The first of Taiwan’s brand-new F-16V fighters are on their way home, and China’s state media wants everyone to know it is not impressed. Two single-seat F-16V Block 70s left the United States on 17 August 2026, routing through Fort Worth,...
Share this story Correction — 24 August 2026This report followed Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces in identifying one of the aircraft struck at Vityazevo as a Su-33. Analysts examining the released footage have since assessed, from the raised fairing...
Share this story Every elegant aircraft has an ungainly predecessor. Before the Hawker Siddeley Harrier hovered over Falklands task forces and Marine Corps flight decks, there was the Hawker P.1127: a stubby, bug-eyed prototype that looked less like a fighter than an...
Share this story Before the Lancaster, before the B-17, before the very idea of a four-engined heavy bomber was settled doctrine, one already existed — and it was bombing London. The Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI, built from 1916, was a four-engined biplane with a...
Share this story On the morning of 27 August 1939, over the Heinkel works at Rostock-Marienehe, a small, stub-nosed monoplane lifted off with a sound no one had heard from an aeroplane before: a rising, tearing howl in place of the familiar hammer of pistons. It was...
Share this story In 1943, someone at Saunders-Roe looked at the vast, airfield-free emptiness of the Pacific and had a gloriously contrary idea: what if your fighter did not need a runway at all? What if it just landed on the sea? The result was the SR.A/1 — the...
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