The Pharaoh’s Supersonic Fighter, Built by a Nazi Legend
It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the brakes, and the little...
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...
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 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...
How Sweden Saved a Crippled American Spy Plane
At 75,000 feet over the Baltic Sea, the world is dark blue above and curved below, and the only sound in the cockpit is the hiss of the pressure suit. On the morning of 29 June 1987, that calm ended with a bang.The right engine of Lt. Col. Duane Noll’s SR-71 Blackbird...
The Tiger Gets a New Set of Claws
The attack helicopter has spent the last few years being written off. Ukraine’s skies, thick with man-portable missiles and cheap drones, have looked like an unkind place for a low, slow gunship. Europe’s answer is not to retire its Tiger — but to rebuild it almost...
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