Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145

Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145

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...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer

A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer

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...
Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar

Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar

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...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus

China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus

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...
Carrier Jets Strike Iran Over Hormuz Tanker

Carrier Jets Strike Iran Over Hormuz Tanker

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...
A Ship-Killer That Fits Inside the F-35

A Ship-Killer That Fits Inside the F-35

For all its sophistication, the F-35 has carried an awkward secret: it could not sink a ship without compromising the one thing it is famous for. Any missile big enough to threaten a modern warship had to hang under the wings — and the moment it does, the...
Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia

Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia

Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay Pacific has...
Wrong Airspace Over Maryland, Meet an F-16

Wrong Airspace Over Maryland, Meet an F-16

Somewhere over western Maryland on Saturday, a private pilot was having an ordinary flight — right up until a fighter jet appeared off the wingtip. Around 12:20 p.m. on 20 June 2026, a small general-aviation aircraft wandered into a Temporary Flight Restriction...
Britain’s New Spy Drone and Its Secret Pod

Britain’s New Spy Drone and Its Secret Pod

Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of its newest drone...