Share this story At 22,000 ft (about 6,700 m), landing gear is supposed to be folded away and forgotten. So when photographer Ján Kolárik pointed his lens at a US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crossing Slovakia, he caught something genuinely odd: one of the giant...
Share this story A grey Super Hornet over the Mojave, blue-banded test rounds under its wings, and a first for US naval aviation. On 14 October 2026, an aviation photographer caught a US Navy F/A-18F from Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31 over Ridgecrest,...
Share this story For 44 years the Frecce Tricolori have painted the Italian sky from the cockpit of a single-engined Aermacchi. Last week, at Leonardo’s plant at Venegono, near Varese, their successor rolled into daylight: the first M-346 built for Italy’s...
Share this story For twelve days in October, the French military rehearsed exactly one scenario in the roadstead of Toulon: how to protect France’s largest naval base. Somewhere in the middle of that rehearsal, someone else’s drones came to watch. On...
Share this story The U.S. Air Force has put a number on what it needs to fight: 1,509 combat-coded fighters by 2035. That is the headline of a new fighter force structure report the service sent to Congress on 16 October 2026, and it is a lot more jets than the USAF...
Share this story Airports are built for the most ordinary moments in a life: a worker flying home on leave, a family waiting at arrivals, a farewell at the security line. On the evening of 21 October 2026, an attack on King Fahd International Airport in Dammam turned...
Share this story A two-seat Flanker down in a field, two pilots on the end of parachutes, and an empty patch of countryside in Russia’s Baltic exclave. On 21 October 2026, a Russian Su-30 crashed during a scheduled training flight in the Kaliningrad region. Both...
Share this story The steps of Namo Ghat were packed before the first engine noise rolled down the river. On Thursday 22 October 2026, thousands of spectators lined the Ganga from Namo Ghat to Assi Ghat as the Indian Air Force opened “Wings Over Ganges”...
Share this story Nine years after its launch at the Paris Air Show and more than six years after its original service-entry target, the Boeing 737 MAX 10 finally has its paperwork. On 20 October 2026 the US Federal Aviation Administration approved the amended type...
Share this story Abu Dhabi, Tuesday 20 October 2026. Between a tour of Edge Group factories and a round of energy deals, France and the United Arab Emirates signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation on the Rafale F5 standard — the next great leap of...
Share this story On 20 October 2026, a grey three-engined tanker that had spent years parked in the Arizona desert took off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and turned east. On paper it is no longer an Air Force jet. KC-10A Extender 86-0034 is now N82247, and it...
Share this story For four weeks the RAF’s contribution to Saudi Arabia’s war in the air was a single grey tanker, quietly passing fuel to Saudi fighters on their patrols. On 20 October 2026, Britain sent the fighters themselves. The UK Ministry of Defence...
Share this story For almost four years after its unveiling, the most basic number about America’s newest bomber was a guessing game. How far does the B-21 Raider reach from wingtip to wingtip? The Air Force never said. Northrop Grumman never said. Then a...
Share this story At about 10:40 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 October 2026, a French Mirage 2000D on its way home to Nancy-Ochey vanished from radar over the wooded hills of Meurthe-et-Moselle. Residents of Rogéville, north-west of Nancy, heard a detonation that shook their...
Share this story For three decades, the antenna field outside Gakona, Alaska, has been the most misunderstood radio transmitter in the world. Now the US military has given it a job conspiracy theorists never predicted: lighting up aircraft far beyond the horizon so...
Slung under a Luftwaffe Tornado, the MW-1 could fire thousands of bomblets and mines sideways in about 0.6 seconds, carpeting a strip of ground up to 500 metres wide. It was built to stop a Warsaw Pact armoured offensive. It was never used in combat, and Germany has destroyed every one.
On 26 October 1967 a surface-to-air missile blew the wing off John McCain’s A-4E Skyhawk over Hanoi. He came down in Truc Bach Lake with both arms and a leg broken. A local man named Mai Van On is credited with pulling him out. Here is what the record shows.