The Drone Was Already Down
The drone had already been shot down. That is the detail that makes this loss different from the others. On Saturday, in northern Iraq, a US service member was killed during a controlled detonation of unexploded ordnance recovered from a downed Iranian one-way attack...
Israel Built a Jet That Attacks With Noise
Most combat aircraft announced at airshows are defined by what they carry. Israel Aerospace Industries spent Monday introducing one defined by what it broadcasts. ELLYON has no bomb bay and no missile rails. Its weapon is a wideband electronically scanned jammer, and...
Sweden Wants Twelve More Gripens Back
Sweden is giving Ukraine a fighter fleet. At Farnborough this week, the head of the Swedish Air Force explained how Sweden intends to avoid ending up smaller as a result. Major General Jonas Wikman told Breaking Defense that a further batch of twelve Gripen E fighters...
Britain’s New Drone Finally Gets Its Weapons
When the Royal Air Force retired its last Reaper in the autumn of 2025, it did so with a gap in the middle of its capability. The replacement was already flying — the Protector RG Mk 1, sixteen of them on order — but it could not yet legally drop or fire anything. At...
The Drone Built by Two Secret Labs
Skunk Works and FalconWorks are the two most secretive advanced-projects shops in Western aerospace. Lockheed Martin’s built the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117. BAE Systems’ is the British equivalent, the place where the awkward, classified and interesting...
Three Drones, One Apache, Triple the Missiles
The model sitting under the lights on Anduril’s stand at Farnborough on Monday morning does not look like anything currently in the US Army inventory. It has two enormous tilting rotors, a fuselage shaped like a stretched teardrop, and where a cockpit should be...
What Is Flying at Farnborough This Week
The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a field watching very...
Four Thousand Aircraft in the Desert
From the air it looks like a filing system for aeroplanes. Row upon row of them, wingtip to wingtip, laid out across ten square kilometres of Arizona desert in lines so straight they look drawn. Bombers here. Fighters there. Transports over there. Around four thousand...
How the Force de Frappe Actually Works
France is the only member of NATO that delivers part of its nuclear deterrent from a fighter cockpit, and the only one whose deterrent answers to nobody outside Paris. Last week two French Rafales flew alongside German Eurofighters in the first joint activity of a new...
Britain’s Secret Aeroplane Laboratory
Earlier this year the RAF’s first E-7 Wedgetail spent a period at a Wiltshire airfield most people have never heard of, having its systems activated and its radar calibrated, before it was allowed anywhere near an operational squadron. That is not unusual....
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