General Atomics has a new drone, and it picked a name that reads like a warning label: Wildfire. Revealed to The War Zone and Aviation Week around 20 August 2026, it is the company's clean-sheet pitch for whatever comes after the MQ-9 Reaper, a workhorse the US has...
Retired jets are supposed to sit quietly in a desert, gathering dust and pigeons. Somebody forgot to tell the Nighthawk. Eighteen years after the US Air Force officially waved goodbye, a dry-as-toast government contracting notice has just outed one of the fleet's...
Aer Lingus began 2026 promising its largest-ever transatlantic schedule. It will end the year having quietly dismantled five of its US routes, a retreat that says as much about the economics of the North Atlantic as it does about one Irish carrier. The reset spans...
Fresh, far clearer imagery of China's new turboprop tactical airlifter surfaced around 21 August 2026, reported first by The War Zone and picked up across the defence press. The photographs, taken at an unidentified test airfield, give the best look yet at a...
After years of slipped deadlines, restarted production lines, and enough delay drama to fill a season of prestige TV, Taiwan's first factory-fresh Vipers are finally pointed home. Two jets, tail numbers 6727 and 6728, lifted off from Fort Worth, Texas, on 17 August...
Alaska Airlines has spent barely sixteen months turning itself from a West Coast workhorse into a transatlantic contender, and it is not slowing down. On 20 August 2026 the Seattle carrier confirmed two new European destinations: Paris and Athens, both launching...
It started before dawn. Eight strikes, one runway, and a message aimed squarely at Ankara. Overnight on 18-19 August 2026, Israeli jets cratered the Abu Duhur air base in Syria's Idlib province, and by sunrise the diplomatic fallout was louder than the bombs. What...
Open-source analysts say Ukrainian forces struck the Russian airbase at Akhtubinsk in the Astrakhan region in the early hours of 20 August 2026, damaging a Su-34 fighter-bomber. The claim rests on satellite imagery circulated by OSINT channels rather than an official...
Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship's centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in aviation history — and...
Decades before the V-22 Osprey, America built an aircraft that could lift off vertically like a helicopter, then cruise at over 400 mph like an airliner — by rotating its entire wing. It worked. It was decades ahead of its time. And almost nobody remembers it....
In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the most successful...
The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of aviation's starkest lessons in a...
Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and utterly outclassed...
In June 1981, a young Israeli pilot flew the most exposed position in one of the most audacious air raids in history. Twenty-two years later, that same man carried a Torah scroll that had survived a concentration camp into orbit — and never came home. Between...
It was a routine training flight on a grey winter afternoon. Three American airmen took off from Wiesbaden in an unarmed little jet, expecting to be back in three hours. They never came home. The shootdown of a U.S. Air Force T-39 Sabreliner over East Germany on 28...
Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the theory was a dead end....
On the last day of 1986, a sleek new fighter lifted off from a runway in Israel and climbed into a clear desert sky. It handled beautifully. It was, by many accounts, world-class. Eight months later, its own government voted to kill it — by a single vote. The...