Aviation World, News
Boeing’s monthly orders ledger usually reads like an accountant’s homework. On May 12 it read like a state secret. Four anonymous customers placed orders for 109 widebody and narrowbody Boeing aircraft. Twenty-eight 777Xs. Fifty-two 737 MAXes. Twenty-five...
Military Aviation, News
The F-35 Lightning II was supposed to cost $4.1 million per aircraft per year to operate. That is the affordability target the US Air Force set for the F-35A, expressed in 2012 dollars. It was the number the Pentagon used to budget the largest single weapons programme...
Military Aviation, News
Two weeks ago, almost nobody outside Silicon Valley defence circles had heard of Perennial Autonomy. The California startup, with barely three years of operating history, was a small dot on the counter-drone industry map. On May 18, the Pentagon handed it half a...
Military Aviation, News
Three years ago, “Group 1 unmanned aircraft” was Pentagon jargon for the little quadcopters you could buy at Best Buy. Today it is the most contested rung of the kill chain on Earth, and on May 18 the Department of War announced that Northrop Grumman — the...
Military Aviation, News
For 81 days the Pentagon told the world Operation Epic Fury was the most successful air campaign since 2003. It probably was. But the bill has finally arrived, and a Congressional Research Service report quietly dropped on May 20 puts a number on it: at least 42...
Aviation World, News
For a year, every American who watched a near-miss video on social media or sat in a four-hour ground stop at Newark wondered the same thing: why is the country's air traffic control infrastructure held together with what looks like duct tape and divine...
Aviation World, News
Two days after a 3.5-foot humanoid robot took its own seat on a Southwest Airlines 737 from Las Vegas to Dallas, the airline issued a policy that did not exist in any other carrier's rulebook in May 2026. Effective immediately, Southwest no longer allows...
Aviation World, News
The American budget-airline map just lost an entry. On 13 May 2026, Allegiant Travel Company closed its $1.5 billion acquisition of Sun Country Airlines, creating what both companies are calling the leading leisure-focused U.S. airline. Combined fleet: 195 aircraft....
Military Aviation, News
For most of the year, the Trump administration’s Golden Dome — the most ambitious continental missile defence project since SDI — has run on a single sticker price: $185 billion. That number was the Pentagon’s. The Congressional Budget Office took a look...
Military Aviation, News
The number is 10,000. Pentagon procurement officers, briefing reporters at the Department of War on 13 May 2026, used that number with the casual fluency of a Costco executive describing a quarterly shipment. Ten thousand low-cost cruise missiles in three years, plus...
Military Aviation, News
For more than a decade, the KC-46 Pegasus has been the most expensive tanker the U.S. Air Force can’t quite use. Boeing has delivered roughly 90 of them. They cost the taxpayer about $200 million apiece. They are supposed to be the spine of American long-range...
Military Aviation, News
For most of the last twenty years, the MQ-9 Reaper was the single most-flown weapon in the U.S. Air Force inventory. From Afghanistan to Yemen, from Niger to Syria, the Reaper turned every minor military problem into a 24-hour-orbit problem solved by a Hellfire. Then...
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