Share this story Walk the static line at ILA Berlin and you expect the usual choreography around a helicopter: a pilot strapping in, a crew chief signalling, the slow whine of an Arriel engine spooling up. This June, Airbus parked something stranger under the...
Share this story For roughly sixteen hours on 23 June 2026, two of the largest combat aircraft ever built carved a long arc through the cold airspace of the European Arctic. Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers — the variable-sweep giants NATO calls...
Share this story At the Farnborough air show in 1953, the crowd hears it before they see it. Ten engines, building from a hum to a roar, and then the largest all-metal flying boat ever built slides overhead — a silver whale of an aircraft, a 219-foot wing, an...
Share this story British defence programmes are not, as a rule, famous for speed. The Ajax armoured vehicle spent eight years mired in delay; the RAF’s Wedgetail radar aircraft arrived three years late. So when three new long-range strike weapons go from a sheet...
Share this story For sixty years, the answer to the question “what does Vietnam fly?” has been simple: whatever Moscow sold it. MiGs, then Sukhois — a proud, entirely Russian air force. In 2026, for the first time, that answer is genuinely in doubt,...
Share this story The footage is grey and silent. A drone’s electro-optical camera holds a small boat in its crosshairs somewhere in the middle of the Black Sea; a laser spot blooms on the hull; the picture shudders. To anyone who lived through the spring of...
Share this story Step onto a Lufthansa A321 at Frankfurt this year and you might find yourself aboard a flying time machine. One aircraft in the fleet, registration D-AISZ, wears a design no airline has flown in earnest for half a century: a deep blue cheatline...
Share this story Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the...
Share this story On a grey June morning at the ILA Berlin air show, the most ambitious warplane Europe never built quietly ceased to exist. The Future Combat Air System — FCAS, or SCAF to the French — was meant to give France, Germany and Spain a...
Share this story On the afternoon of 3 June 1973, an enormous crowd packs the edges of Le Bourget airfield north of Paris, faces turned up to watch the star of the air show: the Soviet Union’s supersonic airliner, the Tupolev Tu-144. Its pilot, Mikhail Kozlov,...
Share this story When you buy a front-line fighter, you also have to solve a quieter problem: how to train the pilots who will fly it. On 16 June 2026, Canada took a major step toward an answer — and the jet it chose is Italian. On the sidelines of the G7 summit...
Share this story High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things...
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