The Night 21 Biplanes Rewrote Naval Warfare
It is approaching eleven o’clock on the night of 11 November 1940, and Lieutenant Commander Kenneth “Hooch” Williamson is pushing his Fairey Swordfish down through the flak over Taranto harbour. Magnesium flares hang in the sky, throwing the anchored...
Lufthansa’s €600 Million Robot Cargo Hub Opens
At Frankfurt Airport, the busiest cargo gateway in Europe, Lufthansa Cargo has switched on the first piece of a €600 million bet on automation. The centrepiece is a warehouse 42 metres tall that, for the most part, runs itself.The new fully automated high-bay...
The Eierlegende Wollmilchsau: How the Panavia Tornado Did Everything NATO Asked — and Survived
The Germans had a word for it. They always do. When Luftwaffe pilots talked about the Panavia Tornado, they called it the eierlegende Wollmilchsau — the “egg-laying wool-milk pig.” A mythical creature that does everything: lays eggs, produces wool, gives...
Serbia Buys Chinese HQ-9: Beijing’s Missiles in NATO’s Backyard
Two hundred miles from the nearest NATO border, Serbia is building an air defence network that Beijing designed and no Western alliance approved. On 28 June, President Aleksandar Vucic confirmed what defence analysts had suspected for months: Belgrade is moving...
The Duck That Invented the Seaplane
It is the morning of 28 March 1910, and a thin mist still clings to the Étang de Berre, the great salt lagoon west of Marseille. A 27-year-old engineer named Henri Fabre sits astride a slender wooden beam, perched above three flat floats that bob gently on the water....
France Turns a Cargo Plane Into a War Brain
It begins, as these things often do, not with a missile but with a laptop. Somewhere in the cavernous cargo hold of a French A400M Atlas — a hold built to swallow a helicopter or a 37-tonne armoured vehicle — an operator will soon sit at a console, watching sensor...
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...
Britain’s Giant Flying Boat, Born Too Late
At the Farnborough air show in 1953, the crowd hears it before they see it. Ten engines, building from a hum to a roar, and then the largest all-metal flying boat ever built slides overhead — a silver whale of an aircraft, a 219-foot wing, an ocean liner that...
Lufthansa Put a 1950s Design on a Modern Jet
Step onto a Lufthansa A321 at Frankfurt this year and you might find yourself aboard a flying time machine. One aircraft in the fleet, registration D-AISZ, wears a design no airline has flown in earnest for half a century: a deep blue cheatline trimmed in yellow that...
Denmark’s Famous Red F-16 Heads to Argentina
Pull the throttle into afterburner and the jet that climbs away from the crowd is scarlet and white, the colours of the Danish flag wrapped around a screaming F-16. For two seasons, E-006 — the “Dannebrog” jet — has been the star of...
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