Harare to Gatwick, Fourteen Years Later
In December 2011, an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767 landed at London Gatwick and did not leave. It was impounded over unpaid debts, and with it went the last direct air link between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom — a route the airline had flown since April 1980. On...
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...
Riyadh Air Wants the Bigger Dreamliner
The first big order of Farnborough 2026 landed before most of the stands had finished setting up. Riyadh Air, the Saudi carrier that flew its first paying passenger barely three weeks ago, spent Monday morning committing to 34 more widebody aircraft across both Boeing...
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...
The New Air Force One Is Going Back In
A reporter at Joint Base Andrews on Sunday evening asked President Trump a direct question: the Qatari jet he is now flying as Air Force One does not have antimissile defences, so why is he flying it? The answer confirmed what aviation and security specialists have...
The Drones Are Coming to Red Flag
Every argument about autonomous combat aircraft eventually arrives at the same question, and it is not a technical one. It is whether the person in the cockpit will trust the thing flying off their wing. Frank Kendall, who ran the US Air Force as its Secretary from...
What Happened at Muwaffaq Salti
The air base is named after a man who died in an aeroplane. Lieutenant Muwaffaq Salti was a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, killed in combat with Israeli fighters on 13 November 1966 during the Battle of Samu. Jordan gave his name to the base at Azraq, out in the...
The RAF’s Newest Jet Is Bright Green
If you happened to be at Birmingham Airport on the afternoon of 15 July, you would have seen something that looked like a mistake: a Boeing 737 with a large rectangular fin bolted to its spine, painted an unlovely metallic green, climbing out over the West Midlands....
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