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 Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different...
Share this story Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the...
Share this story The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the...
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 Japan is 6,800 islands long. Defending that coastline with crewed fighters means either an air force it cannot afford or gaps it cannot accept. Which is why Tokyo is now designing a coastal defence concept built around uncrewed aircraft — and...
Share this story The NH90 has one of the worst reputations in modern military aviation. Australia binned its 46 of them a decade early. Norway walked away. Sweden is phasing its out by 2027. Belgium and Finland are not fans. The type has become shorthand for a...
Share this story It looks like a rifle, weighs less than five pounds, and you can teach somebody to work it in under five minutes. Pacific Air Forces wants sixty of them. It does not, at present, have the money to pay for them. On 8 September 2026, PACAF’s 18th...
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 On Monday morning a white and red turboprop lifted off from Buochs, the airfield tucked under the mountains next to Pilatus’s factory in Stans, and flew a first sortie over central Switzerland. It carried the Swiss test registration HB-HCA and...
Share this story Russia brought its new stealth weapons to a sand-coloured airfield on the Egyptian coast this week and, for the first time, let people photograph them. At the El Alamein International Airshow, sitting on the apron in front of a Su-57 Felon, were three...
Share this story The number that matters is 47. That is how many fighters the United States Air Force is short of the minimum Congress wrote into law — not an aspiration, not a target, a statutory floor. And the service has been below it since at least May. The...
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