Share this story On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British...
Share this story Sweden has roughly ten million people and builds its own fighter aircraft. It has done so, without interruption, since the 1940s. That is a peculiar and slightly improbable national habit, and on 9 September 2026 Stockholm quietly paid to keep it...
Share this story Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled...
Share this story Ten days before the party, the aeroplane went flying anyway. Germany’s first F-35A Lightning II lifted off from Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant on 8 September 2026, wearing a full-colour German flag on the tail and the fuselage code...
Share this story The question being asked in Bern this afternoon is not whether the F-35 procurement went wrong. That is settled. It is whether anyone will personally pay for it. A day after the oversight committee reported that Switzerland never had a fixed price for...
Share this story Somewhere in San Diego there were two MQ-9A Reapers that nobody had bought. They are Italian now. A note on the pictures: no photograph of an Italian Air Force MQ-9 is available under a licence we can use, so the aircraft shown here are US Air Force...
Share this story The problem with the FPV attack drone — the weapon that has defined three years of fighting in Ukraine — is that it needs a pilot. Not a technician, a pilot: somebody who can fly a fast, twitchy quadcopter into a moving target through a...
Share this story In 1975, Switzerland moved a Convair 990 Coronado from Zurich to Lucerne. It took barges, closed roads and a considerable amount of nerve, and the whole country watched. Half a century later, they are seriously proposing to do it again — with...
Share this story On Tuesday afternoon, four people sat down in front of the Swiss press in Bern and said the thing that everybody in the country had suspected for two years but nobody in government would confirm. There was never a fixed price for the F-35. The report...
Share this story For four years the Swiss government told parliament and the public the same thing about its F-35A order: the price was fixed. On Tuesday 8 September 2026 the National Council’s Control Committee published a 95-page report saying that no blanket...
Share this story Buried in Airbus’s monthly order tally, published Monday, is a line for eight A350F freighters. The deal was firmed on 31 August. The customer is not named. It takes firm orders for the aircraft to 115, and it lands about two weeks before the...
Share this story Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone gave the number and then did the arithmetic out loud, which is the part that lands. “Seven hundred takeoffs in two years,” NATO’s most senior military officer said at the Taranto Naval Base in southern...
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