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...
Somewhere off the coast of Oman, in the dark, two U.S. Army aviators are treading water. Their AH-64 Apache is gone — minutes ago it was flying a patrol near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and now it is at the bottom of the Gulf. They are alive, but they are in...
Two-star generals do not usually gang up on Congress. This spring, twenty-two of them did. In a single letter to the House and Senate appropriators, every adjutant general who commands an Air National Guard fighter unit signed the same blunt verdict: the United States...
On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for Shanghai for the...
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...
It is a Saturday morning over the East Sea, and on a Korean radar screen the blips appear early — a cluster of them, more than ten military aircraft, Chinese and Russian, moving in sequence toward the edge of the country’s watch. Inside an air operations...
A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft was...
The most expensive fighter program in history just handed the U.S. Marine Corps six brand-new stealth jets that cannot see. In place of their radar, each F-35B carries a chunk of dead weight bolted into the nose to keep the jet balanced. The Marines accepted them...
At the Irkutsk Aviation Plant on 25 June 2026, a two-seat jet that has spent two decades teaching student pilots how to fly lifted off on a roughly 50-minute sortie, climbed no higher than 2,000 metres (about 6,600 ft) and held its speed below 600 km/h (around 370...
On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo widebodies, with...
It is 4:30 in the morning, Eastern time, and the M/T Kiku is doing what tankers have done through the Strait of Hormuz for a century — threading the world’s most important oil chokepoint with more than two million barrels of crude in her belly. Then a...
There are 21 B-2 Spirits in the world, and on any given day most of them are sitting in climate-controlled hangars in Missouri. So when one of these $2-billion flying wings turns up on the far side of the planet, it is never a coincidence. It is a message. This month...
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