Share this story In September 1966 a French prototype that could take off vertically flew at Mach 2.04 in level flight. Nothing that could hover had ever gone that fast. To manage it, the Dassault Mirage IIIV carried nine jet engines: one large turbofan for forward...
Share this story The FAA has grounded the Elixir, the French two-seat trainer that only won its US type certificate last year. An emergency airworthiness directive published in the Federal Register on 13 October 2026, effective the next day, bars every Elixir in the...
Share this story Germany’s busiest airport is running short of the one thing every departure needs. Lufthansa has told its crews to bring extra jet fuel into Frankfurt, because supplies at the airport are tight. The measure, first reported by the German tabloid...
Share this story Lufthansa has won TAP Air Portugal. After a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Lisbon on Wednesday, 14 October, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro announced that the government had chosen the German group over Air France-KLM to buy 49.9% of the...
Share this story Look at a F-16 rigged for a contested mission and you can count the self-protection on your fingers, because most of it is bolted on. A jamming pod on a station that could have carried a weapon. A dispenser modification. A decoy on a wire. Each box...
Share this story An artificial-intelligence model helping to build missiles sounds like science fiction. According to its own maker, it has already happened. In its threat intelligence report of 10 September 2026, the AI company Anthropic says a weapons cell in...
Share this story This week a team of archaeologists, divers and Purdue University representatives went ashore on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in Kiribati, to look at a shape in a lagoon. If they are lucky, it is the wreck of the most famous lost aeroplane in...
Share this story About an hour after leaving London Gatwick on Tuesday morning, somewhere past Brittany, the crew of British Airways flight BA2660 to Faro turned their Airbus A321 around. A passenger window on the right-hand side of the cabin, near row 3, had been...
Share this story Somewhere over the Balkans, shortly after 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning, a routine holiday flight from Corfu to Nuremberg set four digits in its transponder that no air traffic controller wants to see: 7500. In the language of aviation, that...
Share this story The most expensive moment in an airliner’s day is often not in the air. It is on the ramp, when trucks, tugs, belt loaders and catering lifts crowd around a parked aircraft with minutes to spare. On the evening of Sunday, 11 October, that moment...
Share this story Somewhere over northern Europe on Monday morning, a slim grey wedge with no cockpit sat on a launch rail, lit a rocket booster and went flying. No runway. No pilot. No ladder, no canopy, no crew bus. The aircraft is the Airbus U740 Valkyrie, and it...
Share this story For a crippled American bomber over southern Germany in 1944, Switzerland was often the nearest safe ground. Between August 1943 and April 1945, 166 US bombers came down there. Their crews were safe from the war, but not free: under international law,...
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