The $3,500 Drone That Kills Without a Pilot

The $3,500 Drone That Kills Without a Pilot

The buzz of a Shahed over Kharkiv has become one of the most dreaded sounds of this war. On the night of 8 June 2026, something answered it that no human was flying. A small fixed-wing interceptor lifted off, climbed to its waiting altitude, picked the incoming drone...
Montreal Just Got a Whole New Airport

Montreal Just Got a Whole New Airport

At 7 a.m. on 15 June 2026, a Porter Airlines Embraer E195-E2 rolled toward the runway at a South Shore airfield that had not seen a scheduled airline departure in living memory. As flight PD181 lined up for Vancouver, the airport fire trucks arched a water-cannon...
China’s Cargo Drone Just Flew Itself

China’s Cargo Drone Just Flew Itself

On a grey morning in Pucheng, in China’s Shaanxi province, a chunky white-and-blue aircraft with two propellers and a twin-boom tail rolled down the runway, lifted off, and flew a full 22-minute circuit — climb, manoeuvre, approach and landing. Nothing...
Amazon’s Delivery Drones Just Left the US

Amazon’s Delivery Drones Just Left the US

In a back garden in Darlington, a 40-kilo aircraft drops out of the County Durham sky, hovers about four metres up, releases a shoebox-sized parcel onto the lawn, and climbs away again. No van. No driver. No knock on the door. Just a tube of mascara, or a phone cable,...
The $9 Billion Jet That Never Flew a Passenger

The $9 Billion Jet That Never Flew a Passenger

It flew. That is the strangest, most expensive part of the whole story. The Mitsubishi SpaceJet was not a paper aeroplane or a CGI fantasy that died on a designer’s screen. It rolled out, it taxied, it rotated off the runway at Nagoya, and it climbed into a...