Sweden’s Mach 2 Dragon That Flew From Roads
In the early 1950s, a neutral country of seven million people set out to build a supersonic interceptor that could hide in the forest, launch from a public road, and climb fast enough to catch a Soviet nuclear bomber over the Baltic. The result looked like nothing...
Starlux’s Flying Sculpture Lands in America
Most airlines paint their jets. Taiwan’s STARLUX hired one of the world’s most famous artists to turn an Airbus A350-1000 into a mirror-finished flying sculpture — and on 15 July, it flew the thing across the Pacific to Phoenix.Flight JX026 delivered the STARLUX...
Riyadh Air Cleared for Beijing and Shanghai
Two and a half weeks after it flew its very first paying passengers, Saudi Arabia’s brand-new airline has been handed the keys to the world’s second-biggest aviation market. Riyadh Air is going to China.The Civil Aviation Administration of China has cleared the...
America’s Air War to Keep Hormuz Open
A commercial oil tanker was steaming through international waters toward Iran when a U.S. aircraft put Hellfire missiles into its smokestack. The ship stopped. It was, in the plainest terms, a blockade being enforced with air power — and it is happening every...
The Catalina Flying Boat Rises Again
Eighty years ago, a fat-bellied flying boat called the PBY Catalina rescued downed airmen, sank submarines and crossed oceans on missions that lasted a full day and night. Its type certificate has quietly survived ever since. Now someone wants to build brand-new ones...
Cheap Cruise Missiles, Dropped From Cargo Planes
The Pentagon has decided the next war will be won by arithmetic. Not by a handful of exquisite, million-dollar missiles, but by thousands of cheap ones — enough to swamp any air defence ever built.On 16 July the Department of War signed multiyear framework...
Boeing and Airbus Fight Over 100 Jets
The fiercest duel at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow will not be flown by any display pilot. It will be fought across a conference table, over roughly one hundred single-aisle jets and the signature of one Dublin-based leasing giant.Boeing and Airbus are...
DARPA’s AI Just Flew a Real F-16
For two years the jets sat in a hangar at Eglin Air Force Base while engineers tore into their airframes and taught them to think. This week one of them finally flew — and for stretches of that flight, no human was flying it.The U.S. Air Force and DARPA have put...
Gliders, a Dictator, and an Impossible Takeoff
On the afternoon of 12 September 1943, a string of flimsy plywood gliders scraped down onto a boulder-strewn plateau high in the Italian Apennines, right outside a mountaintop ski hotel. Out of them poured German paratroopers and SS commandos. Within a few minutes,...
He Couldn’t Shoot Them Down
At 27,000 feet over Germany, the air was minus 60 degrees and Charlie Brown’s bomber was dying. Half its engines were gone or failing. The nose was blown open to the wind. The tail gunner was dead, other crewmen were bleeding on the freezing deck, and the young pilot...
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