Rafale for Ukraine: France Starts Training Ukrainian Pilots
Share this story France has moved from promising Rafales to preparing the people who will fly them. Speaking to franceinfo on 29 September, France’s Minister for Europe Benjamin Haddad confirmed that Paris is in talks with Kyiv about sending Rafale fighters to...
F-47 Production Line “Not Too Far Away”, Says USAF Fighter Chief
Share this story The man who buys the US Air Force’s fighters has a simple view of what matters most right now: factories. Speaking at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies on 28 September 2026, Brig. Gen. Timothy Helfrich said the F-47 sixth-generation...
Airbus A350F Flies: Freighter Completes Its Four-Hour Maiden Flight
Share this story Toulouse has seen a great many first flights, but few in a paint scheme that looks like a cardboard box. On 29 September 2026, the first Airbus A350F, MSN700, registered F-WXLD, lifted off from Toulouse-Blagnac in its brown test livery with bright...
Swissair Grounding 2001: The Day Switzerland’s Airline Ran Out of Cash
Share this story At 15:45 on Tuesday, 2 October 2001, Swissair chairman and CEO Mario Corti stood in front of the cameras and announced that the airline would stop flying. By then, jets carrying the Swiss cross were already sitting on aprons from Zurich to New York,...
Pope Leo XIV Blesses Rafale Pilots Escorting His Air France A321
Share this story Most passengers get a window seat and a view of the wing. On Monday morning, 28 September, the passenger in the Air France A321 from Lourdes to Metz got the cockpit, a radio microphone, and two Rafales flying about 50 metres off the nose. Pope Leo XIV...
Inside the Geran-4: RFE/RL Tears Down Russia’s Jet Shahed
Share this story Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has taken a Russian Geran-4 apart on camera, and what spills out of the airframe is less a Russian weapon than a catalogue of global supply chains. The jet-powered successor to the Shahed carries around 55 foreign-made...
Carrier-Capable Aircraft: Why the F-22 Can’t, and a C-130 Did
Share this story On 30 October 1963 the crew of USS Forrestal watched a four-engined transport with a 132-foot wingspan come down their deck. It had no tailhook. It had no catapult attachment. The ship’s island cleared its wingtip by about fifteen feet. It...
F-117 Nighthawk: Retired in 2008, Still Flying in 2026
Share this story In December 2025 a photographer in the California desert filmed two black diamonds coming through a low-level route at a few hundred feet. In 2026 another one caught them again. The aircraft were F-117 Nighthawks, and the United States Air Force...
Pilot Retirement Age by Country: China Stops at 63, Japan at 67
Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Why Nothing Can Replace the Antonov An-124
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
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