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 fighters had just...
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 Gripen F had just...
It was nearly 27 metres of gleaming Soviet ambition — a needle-nosed, missile-armed interceptor built to swat American bombers out of the stratosphere. On 16 July 1956 the Lavochkin La-250 lifted off for the first time, rolled uncontrollably, and slammed back...
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, modern, all-metal...
Look quickly and you might call it a Sabre. Look again and the differences pile up: a fatter fuselage, twin-wheel landing gear, cannon in the nose, and — strangest of all — no air intake at the front. This was the North American YF-93, a fighter built to...
It looked like nothing else in the sky: a stubby twin-engine fighter whose nose stopped dead at the wing, as if someone had sawn the front off a normal aeroplane. Test pilots loved it. Comic-book readers worshipped it. And the U.S. Navy, after flying it against the...
On 26 August 2026, seven Sikorsky S-70i Black Hawks were blessed and formally handed over at Villamor Air Base in Pasay City. With that quiet ceremony, the Philippine Air Force closed out one of the most consequential procurement runs in its history — and became...
The most advanced fighter America builds has a decidedly un-glamorous problem: it runs too hot. Every new sensor, jammer and processor bolted into the F-35 Lightning II throws off heat the jet was never designed to shed — and the fix has become a two-company...
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 whenever the military...
Sweden has decided that its most modern transport helicopter is not worth keeping. From 2027, the Swedish Armed Forces will begin retiring nine NH90 battlefield transports — barely a decade after the last of them was delivered — and lean instead on a...
She was instructing over Oahu on 7 December 1941 when the first wave arrived, and was shot at twice before nine in the morning. Fifteen months later she was dead in a Texas canyon.
Two rotors side by side, sixty-seven metres across the tips, and forty tonnes lifted to 2,255 metres in 1969. No helicopter has lifted more since. Only two were ever built.
A Pearl 15 ran a full simulated flight cycle on pure hydrogen at NASA Stennis. It is a real milestone — and it was a ground rig burning gas, not an aircraft burning liquid.
Five engines, four of which only pushed downwards, and a triplex electronic control system that voted with itself. The SC.1 worked out how to hover a jet more than a decade before the Harrier entered RAF service.
She soloed at twelve, won three aerobatic championships cutting ribbons upside down, then set a land speed record in a jet car. Seventeen records across air and land.
A jet flying wing built to chase laminar flow, and the day in May 1949 when it shook itself apart and made Jo Lancaster the first British pilot to eject in an emergency.
In 1960 a Soviet airliner derived from the Tu-95 bomber averaged 877 km/h over 5,000 km. No propeller-driven aircraft has beaten it since.