Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran's Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran's air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters absorbed...
Share this story In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story The Bay of Pigs is remembered as a landing that failed on the beach. It was lost in the air. Over five days in April 1961, a handful of Cuban pilots in old British piston fighters and American-built jet trainers beat a CIA air force, sank the ships...
Share this story A little before one o'clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: "Arizona". It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis called "the Cube", no...
Share this story An American safety rule does not normally apply to a French or Dutch airline. Put a Delta flight number on the ticket, though, and it does. That is the lesson Air France and KLM have just paid $425,000 to learn, after the US Department of...
Share this story France has had a gap in its electronic ears since 2022, and a business jet with an unusual bulge under its nose is about to close it. The first Dassault Falcon 8X Archange, the French Air and Space Force's new strategic signals-intelligence aircraft,...
Share this story The F-47 has not flown yet, but the US Air Force already knows where it wants to prove the jet is ready for war, and how much it is willing to spend on the buildings. A presolicitation notice posted in late October lays out an "F-47 Future Campus" at...
Share this story For the first time in 44 years, a brand-new fighter type wears the maple leaf. On 22 October 2026 the Royal Canadian Air Force took delivery of its first two CF-35A Lightning IIs at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, and announced the news on social media...
Share this story There are two numbers no airline pilot wants to say on the radio in the same breath: one landing gear leg that will not come down, and minutes of fuel left. On Sunday evening, 25 October, the crew of United Airlines flight 1854 dealt with both over...
Share this story On the road between St. Louis and Mascoutah, Illinois, drivers recently passed something that looked like a manta ray in a white bedsheet. It was the US Navy's second MQ-25A Stingray, wings folded and fuselage shrink-wrapped, riding a flatbed truck to...
Share this story Europe's best-funded defence start-up has decided the drone war needs a cheaper bullet. On Monday 26 October in Berlin, Helsing unveiled Contra, an AI-controlled air defence system, together with two interceptors of its own: the jet-powered AD-1...
Share this story The US Air Force has a tanker problem, and a Washington think tank has just put a price on fixing it. In a report released on 27 October, the Hudson Institute argues that the Air Force should stop buying the KC-46A Pegasus sooner than planned and...
Two A-10 Warthogs from Moody Air Force Base were training over Florida when a sheriff’s search for a man overboard on Lake Arbuckle asked them to keep clear. Instead, the pilots offered to help, and their night vision goggles and targeting pods found the boat in the dark.
Share this story Suppose you want to build an airliner. In the United States you file an application for a type certificate and the Federal Aviation Administration begins work. Your company needs no prior approval to exist as a designer; the FAA will, over the...
Share this story In August 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration published an Unapproved Parts Notification about cup holders. Not a spar fitting, not a fuel pump — cup holders, headset hangers, windshield shades and yoke grips, 3D-printed in a garage and...