Share this story Every fighter jet has the same fatal dependency: a long strip of concrete. Destroy the runway and the aircraft is a very expensive ornament. In the early 1950s, with NATO planners assuming their handful of airfields in Germany would be atomised in the...
Share this story The Royal Air Force flies several aircraft that it cannot refuel. This is not a secret, and it is not new, but it is faintly absurd, and it has finally produced an answer. In a written answer on 2 September, Minister of State for Defence Readiness and...
Share this story There is an Airbus A380 sitting in the sun at Tarbes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It has been there since 16 July 2025. It is painted for an airline that has flown four flights in its entire existence, holds no air operator’s certificate, and is...
Share this story For the second time in four days, Polish fighters have been scrambled to meet a Russian Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea. On Thursday afternoon, 3 September 2026, the four-engined turboprop was intercepted roughly 40 kilometres north...
Share this story Most aeroplanes are shaped by aerodynamics. The Short Skyvan was shaped by what would fit inside it. Short Brothers started from the cargo and worked outwards: a square-section fuselage of constant cross-section, running straight back to a full-width...
Share this story Somebody in the Soviet Ministry of Aircraft Industry decided that what agriculture needed was a jet. Not a jet trainer, not a jet transport. A jet crop-duster. A biplane one. The PZL M-15 Belphegor is the only jet-powered biplane ever put into series...
Share this story On 21 October 1929, a flying boat took off from Lake Constance with 169 people aboard. No aircraft had ever carried close to that many. The record would stand for about twenty years. The Dornier Do X had twelve engines mounted above its wing in six...
Share this story Egypt was the first country outside France to buy the Rafale. Eleven years later, it may be about to become the type’s biggest foreign customer by a wide margin. On 2 September 2026 the French daily La Tribune reported that Cairo has submitted a...
Share this story The treeline is close enough to count individual trees. The horizon sits high in the windscreen, the ground blurring past in green streaks, and somewhere ahead a small jet-powered cruise missile is running for a Ukrainian city at roughly the speed of...
Share this story Germany spent Tuesday accusing Russia of trying to blow up a Ukrainian freighter on German soil. Russia spent the hours that followed escalating its denial, first through its embassy in Berlin, then through Vladimir Putin himself. The sequence...
Share this story In 1947 Avro proposed a bomber shaped like nothing the Royal Air Force had ever bought: a vast tailless delta with no fuselage worth the name, meant to carry a nuclear weapon at high altitude across a continent. It became the Avro Vulcan. There was a...
Share this story On a spring morning at Bordeaux-Mérignac in 1971, a sleek twin-jet lifted off carrying the hopes of the French aircraft industry. Marcel Dassault had built fighters that governments queued up for. Now he was going after Boeing, on...
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