First flown in 1947, the Antonov An-2 has been built in three countries, operated by 47, and remains the only certified biplane in current production. The operating handbook lists no stall speed — for a very good reason.
Air Force One Is Late — Here Is Every Boeing Jet Behind Schedule in 2026
The President of the United States is currently flying around the world on a Qatari hand-me-down. Trump's interim Air Force One is a former royal Boeing 747-8 from Doha that the Air Force just finished repainting red, white and blue because the actual Air Force Ones —...
RAH-66 Comanche: The $7 Billion Stealth Helicopter That Never Got to Fight
The Boeing-Sikorsky RAH-66 was the most advanced reconnaissance helicopter ever designed in America. Two prototypes were built. They flew beautifully. And in February 2004, the Army cancelled it — and rolled the money into drones.
IAI Lavi: Israel’s F-16 Killer That Washington Killed First
December 31, 1986. A small, beautifully proportioned Israeli fighter takes off from Ben Gurion and lands twenty-six minutes later, grinning. Eight months after that, it dies in a cabinet vote in Jerusalem — 12 to 11. The story of the Lavi, the young lion that never roared.
F-47 NGAD: 185 Jets, Mach 2+, and One Big Problem Nobody Talks About
The F-47 has a $20 billion prime contract, 185 jets on order, Mach 2-plus on the spec sheet, eight robot wingmen each, and a $300 million per copy sticker that would make a Lamborghini dealer blush. The Air Force is building it in St. Louis. Boeing's stock loves it....
Lufthansa’s 10-and-10 Widebody Bet — and Why the Split Matters
The Lufthansa Group supervisory board signed off on the 20-widebody order two weeks ago — ten Airbus A350-900s and ten Boeing 787-9s, $7.7 billion at list, deliveries 2032 through 2034. The headline numbers have been digested. What deserves a second look is the...
Wiley Post: The One-Eyed Roughneck Who Flew Solo Around the World First
In July 1933, a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck with a prison record and a Lockheed Vega named Winnie Mae did something no human had ever done — flew solo around the world. Charles Lindbergh got the headlines. Wiley Post got the rest.
64 Days Aloft Over Vegas: The Hacienda Endurance Flight Nobody Has Beaten
In December 1958 a slot-machine mechanic and a flight instructor took off in a Cessna 172 from Las Vegas, refuelled in mid-air from a speeding station wagon, and didn’t land for 64 days. The record still stands.
Oscar Perdomo: The Last ‘Ace in a Day’
August 13, 1945. Two days from Japan’s surrender. A 26-year-old lieutenant from El Paso flew a P-47N over Korea and shot down five enemy aircraft in a single mission. Nobody has done it since.
The Army Just Strapped a Rocket Launcher to a 150-Pound Cargo Drone
Somewhere at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the US Army took a delivery drone — the kind built to fly a cooler of MREs and ammo to an infantry squad — and bolted a rocket launcher onto it. Then it lit the rockets off. The test on 20 May 2026 paired a Survice Engineering...
YAL-1: The 747 With a Megawatt Death Ray Strapped Inside
The Boeing YAL-1 was an exercise in audacious physics. Take a 747-400F freighter. Cut open the nose. Bolt in a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser the size of six SUVs. Aim it at a ballistic missile climbing through the atmosphere at Mach 7, and pump enough...
Canada Just Bet on Leonardo’s Newest Trainer Jet
If you wanted to draw a quiet line on a world map showing where Leonardo's jet trainer business is winning, you would now need to extend it across the Atlantic. On 26 May 2026, at the company's Venegono plant north of Milan, ITPS Canada signed for six M-346T Block 20s...
airBaltic Has Until 30 June, or It Dies
There are airlines that fail dramatically — engines unspooling on the apron, court bailiffs at the gate, headlines about stranded passengers. And then there are airlines that fail the way airBaltic might fail: quietly, through a spreadsheet, on a particular Friday at...
Russia’s Two-Seat Su-57D Isn’t a Trainer — It’s a Drone Commander
For a week, the West called it a trainer. Then TASS spoke. Russia’s twin-seat Su-57D is not a school plane — it’s an airborne command post built to run a flight of loyal-wingman drones. Sukhoi chief test pilot Sergey Bogdan explains why.
Chengdu’s Building Boom: China Is on Track for 400 Stealth Fighters a Year
Commercial satellite imagery shows Chengdu and Shenyang adding hundreds of thousands of square metres of factory space — and analysts now estimate the PLAAF could field 1,000 fifth-gen fighters by 2030.
China Just Handed Boeing a 200-Jet Lifeline
For nearly a decade Boeing has been doing the corporate equivalent of staring at China through a chain-link fence. Tariffs, the 737 MAX grounding, the trade war, a pandemic, more tariffs — name a thing that could keep a US planemaker out of the world's biggest...
A Russian Drone Just Hit a NATO Apartment Building
At precisely the moment Bucharest was hoping the war next door would stay next door, a Russian Geran-2 — the Tehran-designed Shahed-136 rebadged in Cyrillic — drifted some four minutes through Romanian airspace and detonated on the roof of an apartment block in...
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