Share this story Before noon on 31 August 2026, about 30 kilometres north of the little Polish seaside town of Łeba, Polish fighters slid into position alongside a four-engined Russian turboprop and escorted it along the coast. The aircraft was an Ilyushin Il-20...
Share this story Stand at the window of any airport terminal today and play a game: try to tell the airliners apart by shape alone. This is harder nowadays than it used to be. Boeing or Airbus, regional jet or long-haul giant, they are all the same basic object...
Share this story On the grey afternoon of 12 February 1942, six ancient-looking biplanes lumbered off the runway at RAF Manston, near Dover, and turned out over a freezing sea. They were Fairey Swordfish — fabric-and-wire torpedo bombers with open cockpits and a...
Share this story It was meant to be an ordinary Saturday morning in southern Hungary. Instead, a light aircraft lifted off from the grass at Kalocsa with a man at the controls who had no business flying it, and pointed its nose toward the one place in the country...
Share this story When people list the great fighters of the Second World War, they name the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Bf 109, the Zero. They rarely mention the Macchi C.202 Folgore — and that is an injustice. In the right hands the sleek Italian fighter could...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build...
Share this story On the evening of 10 May 1941, the third most powerful man in Nazi Germany climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter, alone, and pointed it at Scotland. No orders. No co-pilot. No authorisation from Hitler. Just Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer,...
Share this story It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of...
Share this story On the afternoon of August 28, five grey shapes dropped out of the Atlantic murk and settled onto the runway at Łask, in central Poland. Tail numbers 3512, 3513, 3514, 3515 and 3516. With their wheels down, Poland’s fleet of fifth-generation...
Share this story At 09:40 on the morning of 28 August 2026, a twin-tailed shape lifted off the runway at Linköping and climbed into a grey Swedish sky. Forty minutes later it was back on the ground — and the Gripen family had a new member. The two-seat...
Share this story In September 1939, Poland went to war in the air flying gull-winged fighters that belonged to another decade. Yet in a hangar at Okęcie sat the aircraft that was supposed to change all that: the PZL.50 Jastrząb — the Hawk — a sleek,...
Share this story A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 on final approach to Cologne/Bonn came uncomfortably close to a drone earlier this year. This week, the consequences arrived: Germany’s air-navigation authority has rewritten how the airport’s runways are used...
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