Share this story The pilot described it as the jet just stopping in mid-air. On 3 December 2025 a Thunderbirds F-16 was flying loops and rolls over the California desert. The pilot, an instructor with nearly 1,400 hours, had peeled off from the delta formation during...
Share this story Australia has a surveillance problem that is essentially arithmetic. The area it is expected to watch is vast, the number of aircraft it can afford is not, and the distances mean an aircraft spends much of its life transiting rather than looking. On...
Share this story For six months the accounting was guesswork, satellite imagery and leaks. Last week the United States government published its own figures, twice. On 14 September the Pentagon’s Lead Inspector General delivered its first quarterly report to Congress...
Share this story There are two aircraft in the world that can pick up something genuinely enormous and fly it a very long way. One is Ukrainian and first flew in 1982. The other is American and stopped being built in 2015. Europe owns almost none of either, and the...
Share this story It is one aeroplane. That is the first thing to say, because the numbers here are small and the meaning is not. On Tuesday the British Ministry of Defence announced that a single Royal Air Force Voyager tanker will deploy to help Saudi Arabia defend...
Share this story The golf course at Spangdahlem Air Base sits directly under the approach to Runway 04. On Tuesday afternoon it became a crash site. At roughly half past two local time, a F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the base resident 52nd Fighter Wing came down...
Share this story A crate of broken fighter parts is the least glamorous object in military aviation. Nobody guards it the way they guard a jet. It goes in a container, on a commercial aircraft, and turns up at a repair shop on the other side of the world. That is how...
Share this story Luxembourg’s Findel Airport has now been closed by drones twice inside a week, and nobody knows who is flying them. The first closure, on Friday evening 18 September, diverted nineteen inbound flights and stranded more than 1,800 passengers. The...
Share this story At a quarter to midnight on Monday, Vilnius International Airport stopped accepting arrivals. The cause was not weather, not a technical fault, and not a drone. It was balloons. Lithuanian authorities detected what the airport described as...
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
Share this story Photographs circulating from Iran this week show a scatter of scorched composite panels, burnt wiring and a small turbojet, laid out on bare ground. Iranian sources say it was shot down. What it is, is more interesting than how it got there. The parts...
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