Military Aviation, News
On May 15, Israel’s Ministry of Defense signed a $34 million contract with Cyclone, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, to develop and produce external fuel tanks and conformal fuel tanks for the F-35I Adir. It is a deal born not of peacetime planning but of hard...
Military Aviation, News
The B-1B Lancer is getting the biggest weapons upgrade in its operational history. The U.S. Air Force’s Load Adaptable Modular (LAM) pylon program will restore six dormant external hardpoints on the bomber, boosting its total precision weapons capacity by...
Military Aviation, News
Somewhere on a taxiway at a Northrop Grumman test facility, something remarkable happened last week — and nobody was in the cockpit. The YFQ-48A Talon Blue, Northrop Grumman’s contender for the Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program,...
Military Aviation, News
The Navy’s long wait for an autonomous flying gas station just ended. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao confirmed during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 19 that the MQ-25 Stingray — Boeing’s uncrewed, carrier-based aerial refuelling...
Military Aviation, News
At Wallops Island, Virginia, on the morning of 27 February 2026, a Rocket Lab HASTE rocket lifted off from Pad 2 carrying a 3.5-metre Australian aircraft tucked inside its nose fairing. Six minutes later, somewhere above the Atlantic at 32 kilometres altitude, the...
Aviation World, News
For most of aviation history, the salary difference between a Delta captain and a United captain on the same kind of aircraft was a real number. Sometimes 5%. Sometimes 8%. Always enough to matter when a pilot was deciding which big airline to chase. In 2026, that...
Aviation World, News
Boeing’s monthly orders ledger usually reads like an accountant’s homework. On May 12 it read like a state secret. Four anonymous customers placed orders for 109 widebody and narrowbody Boeing aircraft. Twenty-eight 777Xs. Fifty-two 737 MAXes. Twenty-five...
Aviation World, News
Cape Town, Las Vegas, JFK, Aruba, Jeddah, Kuwait, Costa Rica’s San José — and eleven European short-hops including Cologne, Grenoble, Izmir, Riga and Kalamata. British Airways is dropping nineteen routes from its summer 2026 timetable. Seven long-haul, eleven...
Military Aviation, News
The F-35 Lightning II was supposed to cost $4.1 million per aircraft per year to operate. That was the affordability target Lockheed Martin set in 2012. It was the number the Pentagon used to budget the largest single weapons programme in human history. The actual...
Military Aviation, News
On the night of May 7, a Ukrainian drone wandered into Latvian airspace from Russia, lost contact under intense electronic warfare jamming, and slammed into an empty oil tank at a fuel depot near Rēzekne, about 40 kilometres from the Russian border. No casualties....
Military Aviation, News
Two weeks ago, almost nobody outside Silicon Valley defence circles had heard of Perennial Autonomy. The California startup, with fewer than 100 employees and barely two years of operating history, was a small dot on the counter-drone industry map. On May 19, the...
Military Aviation, News
Three years ago, “Group 1 unmanned aircraft” was Pentagon jargon for the little quadcopters you could buy at Best Buy. Today it is the most contested rung of the kill chain on Earth, and on May 18 the Department of War announced that Northrop Grumman — the...
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