Fourteen years ago, AirAsia X tried to do something that sober aviation economists said couldn’t be done: fly a budget airline halfway around the planet. It ran low-cost long-haul flights from Kuala Lumpur to London and Paris — and in 2012, bruised by fuel bills and...
Wars have a way of writing defence budgets. Israel’s most recent confrontation with Iran was barely over before its government reached for the chequebook — and the order it placed says exactly where it believes its security now rests: in the air, and in stealth.Israel...
You can learn a lot about a country’s ambitions from a satellite photo. In June 2026, one such image — a full-scale aircraft shape sitting on a measurement range near Hyderabad — told the world that India’s long-promised stealth fighter is no longer just a PowerPoint...
There is a particular kind of optimism in launching a long-haul route, and a particular kind of indignity in having your inaugural flight turn around in mid-air. Scandinavian Airlines managed both in the same week.On 2 June 2026, SAS opened a new nonstop service...
For seventy years, the story of air power in South Asia had a familiar shape: India bought the best jets money could find — French, Russian, British — and Pakistan made do with whatever it could afford or build. That hierarchy is about to be turned upside down, and...
Somewhere on the seabed off the coast of Virginia lies a 15-metre telescoping arm worth about $10 million. It used to belong to a U.S. Air Force KC-46A Pegasus tanker. Then, in a few violent seconds over the Atlantic, it didn’t.Well — almost. In the interest of...
It reads like the plot of a heist film. Smuggle swarms of attack drones thousands of kilometres into the enemy’s heartland, hidden inside ordinary cargo trucks. Park them, unremarked, beside the most valuable aircraft in the arsenal. Then, at a chosen moment,...
You step onto a parked airliner and everything just works. The cabin lights are on, the air is cool, screens are glowing — and yet the two great engines on the wings are stone-cold silent. Somewhere behind you, a faint high-pitched whine is the only clue to what...
Launching a torpedo is the easy part. The hard part is what happens next: keeping a one-tonne self-propelled bomb running dead straight and at exactly the right depth, through the chaos of the sea, toward a ship that is moving and may be more than a mile away. There...
For most of military history, shooting down an aircraft with artillery was a grim game of chance. Gunners flung up thousands of shells set to burst at a guessed altitude, hoping one happened to explode at the exact instant an enemy plane flew past. Then a small...
As the Third Reich’s fortunes collapsed, its engineers reached for ever more extreme ideas. Some were genuinely brilliant. Some were merely enormous. And a few belonged squarely in science fiction. Hitler’s faith in war-winning “wonder weapons”...
In 1942, with the tide of the Pacific war already turning against them, Japanese planners sketched out an aircraft of breathtaking ambition. It would take off from Japanese soil, fly across the Pacific, bomb the industrial cities of the United States — and then,...
For the last few years, the main battle tank has been written off as a dinosaur — a 70-tonne monster that a $500 drone can turn into scrap. So why is China pouring resources into tanks? Because it is building a very different kind: lighter, cheaper, more...
High above the misty jungle mountains of Laos, an unarmed supply helicopter found itself in the middle of an air raid. Its crew had a choice: flee, or fight back with the only weapon on board — a single AK-47 rifle. They chose to fight. What happened next has...
It needs no gunpowder, no explosive warhead, and no rocket motor. It simply uses electricity and magnetism to fling a chunk of metal at seven times the speed of sound, destroying its target through raw kinetic energy. For a while, the electromagnetic railgun looked...
Look closely at the photograph: those are two full-size 1950s automobiles, parked comfortably underneath the helicopter. Above them sits a single rotor so vast that each of its two blades weighs as much as a small car and is wide enough to walk along. And it was spun...
Every so often, a clip resurfaces online claiming that the Hollywood star Emma Stone made history as “the first civilian to fly in an F-22 Raptor.” It collects millions of views, a flurry of amazed comments, and the occasional breathless re-share. It is...
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