Ukraine Loses a MiG-29 in the Dark — Pilot Walks Away
Somewhere over Poltava Oblast, in the dark hours before dawn on 27 June, a Ukrainian MiG-29 simply went quiet. One moment the fighter was flying a combat mission; the next, contact was gone. The jet did not come home. This is the part of the war that does not trend....
Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet
On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for Shanghai for the...
Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145
Walk the static line at ILA Berlin and you expect the usual choreography around a helicopter: a pilot strapping in, a crew chief signalling, the slow whine of an Arriel engine spooling up. This June, Airbus parked something stranger under the Brandenburg sun. The...
Seoul Scrambles as 10 Warplanes Test Its Watch
It is a Saturday morning over the East Sea, and on a Korean radar screen the blips appear early — a cluster of them, more than ten military aircraft, Chinese and Russian, moving in sequence toward the edge of the country’s watch. Inside an air operations...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer
A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft was...
Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar
The most expensive fighter program in history just handed the U.S. Marine Corps six brand-new stealth jets that cannot see. In place of their radar, each F-35B carries a chunk of dead weight bolted into the nose to keep the jet balanced. The Marines accepted them...
Russia’s Trainer Grows Teeth: Yak-130M Flies
At the Irkutsk Aviation Plant on 25 June 2026, a two-seat jet that has spent two decades teaching student pilots how to fly lifted off on a roughly 50-minute sortie, climbed no higher than 2,000 metres (about 6,600 ft) and held its speed below 600 km/h (around 370...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus
On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo widebodies, with...
The Plane So Ugly It Ended Up in Mad Max
There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome cast it...
Russian Blackjacks Meet Norway’s F-35s Over the Arctic
For roughly sixteen hours on 23 June 2026, two of the largest combat aircraft ever built carved a long arc through the cold airspace of the European Arctic. Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers — the variable-sweep giants NATO calls “Blackjack”...
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