Sweden’s Flying Barrel Went to War for the UN
It looked like a beer barrel with wings, and the Swedes said so themselves — they called it Flygande Tunnan, the “Flying Barrel.” But behind that comical shape hid a serious pioneer: the first swept-wing fighter to enter squadron service anywhere in...
The Biggest Fighter Ever Built Was a Bomber-Hunter
Line the Tupolev Tu-128 up next to the bombers it was built to shoot down, and you might struggle to tell the hunter from the prey. At nearly 30 metres long and around 43 tonnes, this Soviet interceptor was bigger and heavier than many of the aircraft it was meant to...
The Russian F-22 Rival That Flew After It Was Cancelled
In 1997, the Russian government formally cancelled the fighter that was supposed to answer the American F-22. Three years later, in front of an invited crowd at Zhukovsky, that cancelled fighter took off anyway. The Mikoyan 1.44 is one of aviation’s strangest...
NATO Massed Its Jets Right Next to Kaliningrad
On Tuesday, 18 August 2026, a very unusual crowd gathered in the sky over northern Poland and the Baltic — and every serious flight-tracker in Europe stopped to watch. In a large, U.S.-led NATO air exercise, a dense package of allied aircraft flew combat-strike,...
China Built a Mirror? The Silver J-35 Explained
A single photograph, and the internet decided China had built a mirror. Over the weekend of Aug. 19, 2026, fresh images of a PLA Navy J-35 carrier fighter in flight rocketed around military-watcher circles. Instead of the usual matte grey, the jet’s skin caught...
A JASDF Eagle Landed at Naha, Facing the Wrong Way
It is one thing to bring a fighter home in one piece. It is another to bring it home facing the wrong way. On the morning of Aug. 18, 2026, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force F-15J Eagle touched down on Runway 36L at Naha Airport, on the island of Okinawa, and the left...
SPART: The 21-Year-Old’s $10,000 Answer to the Shahed
Somewhere over Ukraine tonight, a lawnmower engine bolted to a warhead is droning toward a city. It is called a Shahed-136, Russia stamps out its own copies as the Geran-2, and it costs somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. The problem has never been...
France’s Arms Ledger Stays at Altitude: €21 Billion, and the Rafale Still Leads
The number barely moved, and that is precisely the point. France booked €21.24 billion in new arms-export orders in 2025, its Ministry of the Armed Forces told Parliament in the annual report published on 13 August. A shade below 2024’s €21.59 billion,...
India’s Titanium Bottleneck: The Metal That Could Ground Tejas and AMCA
India’s fighter problem used to be a problem you could count. Dozens of finished Tejas Mk1A airframes have sat on Hindustan Aeronautics Limited’s (HAL) lines in Nashik and Bengaluru, waiting on a single missing part, the General Electric F404 engine, from...
Romanian F-16 Guns Down a Sea Drone
Every drone story from NATO’s eastern flank this summer has ended the same way: something falls out of the sky. On 20 August 2026, Romania rewrote the script. This time the target was not overhead. It was in the water, drifting toward a gas platform packed with...
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