Riyadh Air Takes Off – London First
On 10 June 2026, a Boeing 787-9 in a striking deep-violet livery rolled to a stop at London Heathrow. For most travellers it was just another widebody from the Gulf. For the aviation industry, it was the moment a three-year-old PowerPoint finally became a real...
Canada Weighs a Split F-35 and Gripen Fleet
For years, Canada’s next fighter was a settled question: 88 Lockheed Martin F-35As, full stop. In 2026, that certainty has dissolved. Ottawa is now seriously studying something far more unusual — buying a chunk of Swedish Saab Gripens instead of some of...
Warthogs Home From Iran, Covered in Kill Marks
On June 12, 2026, eleven A-10C Thunderbolt IIs touched down at RAF Lakenheath in England, pausing on the long flight home to Georgia after a war. They had left as plain grey jets. They came back as something else entirely. Each Warthog now wore a freshly painted nose:...
The World’s Longest Flight Just Got a Date
On 2 June 2026, a bare green-primer jet lifted off from Toulouse, climbed past 41,000 feet, and flew for three hours and forty-three minutes before coming home. It wore no airline colours yet — just a working title stencilled down the fuselage: “First...
A $300,000 Hypersonic Missile for the Super Hornet
For two decades, “hypersonic” meant “expensive.” A single Mach-5 missile could cost tens of millions of dollars — exquisite, rare, and far too precious to fire in bulk. The U.S. Navy just placed an order that takes a wrecking ball to that...
Air Force One’s Last Ride After 35 Years
It touched down in the dark at Joint Base Andrews, taxied to a stop, and spooled down its four engines — possibly for the last time as the most recognizable airplane on Earth. On June 18, 2026, a Boeing 747 wearing the tail number 92-9000 brought President...
How IRST Lets Fighters See Without Radar
Imagine two fighter pilots closing on each other at a combined speed of Mach 3. One switches on his radar — and in doing so, announces his presence to every sensor within 200 kilometres. The other keeps his radar silent, yet sees his opponent clearly on a display,...
The Su-25 Frogfoot: Russia’s Indestructible Ground-Attack Jet
The morning fog still clings to the valley floor when the pair of jets appears — not streaking overhead like interceptors, but hugging the terrain at treetop level, engines screaming, wings loaded with rockets and bombs. A burst of cannon fire tears into the hillside....
The F-104 Starfighter: Mach 2 Missile With a Man in It
In December 1951, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson — the most brilliant aircraft designer America ever produced — sat in a cold briefing room at a forward air base in Korea. Around him, combat pilots fresh from tangling with MiG-15s over the Yalu River told him...
The Northrop YB-49: The Flying Wing That Died So the B-2 Could Live
The morning of 21 October 1947, a shape unlike anything that had ever left the ground rolled onto the sun-baked lakebed at Muroc Army Air Field. No fuselage. No tail. Just wing — 172 feet of it, curved and impossibly smooth, like something poured rather than built....
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