United Wraps a Jet in Stars and Stripes
United Airlines just turned a Boeing 787-10 into a flying flag. On 15 June 2026, the carrier rolled out a bold “Stars and Stripes” special livery — a deep blue fuselage, fifty white stars, and diagonal red-and-white stripes sweeping across the tail...
Canada Picks an Italian Jet to Train Its Pilots
When you buy a front-line fighter, you also have to solve a quieter problem: how to train the pilots who will fly it. On 16 June 2026, Canada took a major step toward an answer — and the jet it chose is Italian. On the sidelines of the G7 summit in France,...
France Fires Its New Missile at Supersonic Speed
High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things a weapon can be...
Anchorage to Boston, Nonstop for the First Time
For the first time ever, you can fly from Alaska to New England without stopping. On 13 June 2026, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 lifted off from Ted Stevens Anchorage International and pointed its nose almost due east, bound for Boston — roughly eight hours and...
Raptors Meet Finland’s Stealth Fighters in Arkansas
Two of the rarest sights in modern air combat shared the same patch of Arkansas sky on 16 June 2026: an F-22 Raptor and an F-35 painted in the markings of the Finnish Air Force, flying wingtip to wingtip. One was built to own the sky; the other to see everything in...
A Pilot Just Flew a Drone From Another Jet
Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other aircraft entirely,...
America’s Robot Fighters Cleared for Mass Production
For decades, “fighter jet” meant a human strapped into a cockpit. On 17 June 2026, the U.S. Air Force quietly ended that monopoly. It signed production contracts for two jet-powered combat aircraft that have no cockpit, no ejection seat, and no pilot — and...
The Flying Barrel That Predicted the Jet Engine
It looks like someone strapped wings and two open cockpits onto a beer keg and pushed it off a hill. Short, fat and hollow, the Stipa-Caproni is routinely voted one of the ugliest aircraft ever to actually fly. And yet this 1932 Italian oddity quietly sketched out an...
The Warplane Germany Built Lopsided on Purpose
Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes and bolted them...
Flight 19: The Squadron That Never Came Home
It was a bright, ordinary afternoon in Florida. At about two o’clock on 5 December 1945, five Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers rumbled off the runway at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine navigation exercise. Fourteen men, a clear sky, a familiar patch of...
Recent Comments