Share this story Twice in the last two days, an airliner has set the hijack code. On Tuesday a Corendon 737 squawked 7500 on its way to Nuremberg and two German Eurofighters were sitting off its wings before it landed. On Wednesday an Air India 787 did the same over...
Share this story At around three o’clock on the afternoon of 26 January 1942, a formation of open-cockpit biplanes flew north up the coast of Malaya towards a Japanese landing at Endau. They were Vickers Vildebeests, torpedo bombers designed in the 1920s, with a...
Share this story Imagine running an air force whose newest bomber is faster than every fighter you own. That was the problem facing the Royal Air Force at the start of the 1930s, and the aircraft that caused it was a sleek silver biplane from Sydney Camm’s...
Share this story On 12 April 1940, two young trainee pilots took a Royal New Zealand Air Force biplane up over the Southern Alps for a climb to altitude. Somewhere near Mount White, the Fairey Gordon spun, recovered, and then flew into the trees on a ridge. It flipped...
Share this story In July, India’s first AI-piloted fighter existed as renderings and a doctrine with a memorable name. On 13 October 2026, it got a body. Bengaluru start-up Flying Wedge Defence & Aerospace (FWDA) wheeled out a full-scale static prototype of...
Share this story For three and a half weeks this autumn, Britain’s skies hosted the RAF’s biggest homeland defence exercise. Now the Royal Air Force has published the final tally for Exercise Cobra Warrior 26-2: 942 sorties, more than 2,500 flying hours...
Share this story For more than three decades, the backbone of Ukraine’s fighter force was Soviet: MiG-29s and Su-27s, designed in Moscow and maintained with whatever spares could be scrounged after 1991. That era has quietly ended. According to an assessment...
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 There is a moment in the design of every defensive electronic warfare system where the engineering stops being intuitive. You are being tracked by a radar. The obvious response is to drown that radar in noise. And the moment you do, you have told...
Share this story Ask a room of warbird enthusiasts which was the best piston-engined fighter of the Second World War in Europe and you will start an argument that has been running for 80 years. Two names come up again and again: the American P-51D Mustang and the...
Share this story For most of the history of air defence, the target was worth more than the missile that killed it. A bomber, a fighter or a cruise missile cost millions, so a missile that cost hundreds of thousands was a bargain. Drones broke that arithmetic. A...
Share this story Between the top of the weather and the bottom of space lies a band of sky that almost nobody uses. The stratosphere, roughly 18 to 30 kilometres up for the purposes of this story, is too high for airliners and most fighters, far below satellites, and...
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