


Lufthansa Wins TAP Air Portugal: €1.2 Billion for a 49.9% Stake
Share this story Lufthansa has won TAP Air Portugal. After a meeting of the Council of Ministers in Lisbon on Wednesday, 14 October, Prime Minister Luís Montenegro announced that the government had chosen the German group over Air France-KLM to buy 49.9% of the...
SPECTRA and Praetorian: Europe’s Fighter Self-Protection Suites
Share this story Look at a F-16 rigged for a contested mission and you can count the self-protection on your fingers, because most of it is bolted on. A jamming pod on a station that could have carried a weapon. A dispenser modification. A decoy on a wire. Each box...
Checked Baggage: What the FAA and IATA Allow in the Hold
Share this story Everyone knows the cabin rules. Liquids in a bag, laptop out of the case, no knives. The hold feels like the forgiving place, the hole in the aeroplane where the awkward things go once the security theatre is over. It is the opposite. For an entire...
Anthropic Report: A Yemen Cell Used Claude Code to Write Missile Guidance Software
Share this story An artificial-intelligence model helping to build missiles sounds like science fiction. According to its own maker, it has already happened. In its threat intelligence report of 10 September 2026, the AI company Anthropic says a weapons cell in...
Why the Houthis Are So Hard to Defeat From the Air: Seven Reasons
Share this story In October 2026 Houthi missiles are again falling on Saudi Arabia. On 10 October a ballistic missile hit terminals 3 and 4 at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport, killing at least 13 people. Saudi investigators say drones went in first to...
Lockheed Electra 10E: The Airliner Amelia Earhart Vanished In
Share this story This week a team of archaeologists, divers and Purdue University representatives went ashore on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in Kiribati, to look at a shape in a lagoon. If they are lucky, it is the wreck of the most famous lost aeroplane in...
Top Aces, Draken and ATAC: The Contractors That Play the Enemy
Share this story On 22 September a grey-camouflaged Hawker Hunter lost engine thrust and went into the Pacific off Morro Bay, California. The pilot ejected and was rescued. The jet was not flying for any air force. It belonged to ATAC, a private company paid to play...
COMAO Explained: How Air Forces Fly Dozens of Jets as One Package
Share this story When the Royal Air Force released the figures for Exercise Cobra Warrior 26-2 on 13 October, the headline number was 942 sorties. The more interesting number was smaller: fourteen. That was how many “complex missions” the five nations flew...
Hypersonic Weapons Explained: Boost-Glide, Scramjet and Ballistic
Share this story On 13 October Pakistan announced a test of its Fatah-2 ER and called it a hypersonic missile. Russia calls the Kinzhal hypersonic. So does China with the DF-17, and so does the US Air Force with the HACM it hopes to field later this decade. The word...
Quick Reaction Alert Explained: How Fighters Intercept a Hijacked Airliner
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...
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