Share this story In September 2020 Swiss voters approved a new fighter fleet by 8,515 votes out of more than three million cast. It was the narrowest margin in modern Swiss defence politics, and the case for it rested heavily on one reassuring word: the price was...
Share this story The aeroplane was ready to go. Fully fuelled, passengers in their seats, catering loaded, doors about to close. It was a Sunday afternoon in Geneva and the Aeroflot A321 had landed from Moscow only a couple of hours earlier. Then the European Union...
Share this story The aeroplane was a few months old. It was empty except for the three people flying it, on a short hop across the Mediterranean to collect passengers in Libya. It was a routine positioning flight, the kind that happens a thousand times a morning...
Share this story Air defence against a Shahed-type drone is, more often than not, a human being looking up. The aircraft is small, slow, made largely of composite and plywood, and flies low enough to disappear into ground clutter. Radar helps. Thermal sights help. But...
Share this story A Royal Danish Air Force Fennec helicopter was photographing a Russian frigate over the Baltic on Monday evening when the frigate fired two flares at it. One passed close to the aircraft. Nobody was hurt and the helicopter was undamaged. It was flying...
Share this story Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air...
Share this story The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has the 1903 Wright Flyer. It has the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module, a Concorde, a Space Shuttle and an SR-71 Blackbird. What it has never had, in all the years since the...
Share this story At one minute to one on Sunday afternoon, phones across Vilnius lit up telling people to get to shelter. The airport stopped accepting arrivals and departures. A fighter launched from Siauliai, 185 kilometres to the north-west, and went looking for...
Share this story Three numbers changed on Monday morning, and one name. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in National Harbor, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the service now intends to have at least 500 Collaborative...
Share this story In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations...
Share this story For decades the American position on weapons in orbit was a careful non-answer. Officials talked about resilience, about protecting assets, about counter-space capability in the abstract. Nobody said the United States had put weapons up there. On...
Share this story The United States bought 337 MQ-9 Reapers over the nineteen-year life of the programme. After the fighting with Iran, the Air Force has roughly 135 left, against a floor it says should be 189. That is the arithmetic behind everything that happened on...
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