Somewhere in Waco, Texas, a Boeing 747 that used to carry Qatari royalty is being dressed up in red, white, and blue. By this summer, it'll be calling itself Air Force One. The Air Force announced on May 1 that the "Bridge" VC-25B has completed its modification work...
On the morning of May 10, 2026, a Qatar Airways aircraft pushed back from Hamad International Airport and pointed its nose toward Baghdad. For forty days, Iraq's airspace had been sealed shut — a casualty of the regional war. The engines spooling up that morning meant...
Brazil doesn't always get credit for aerospace excellence. But on May 8, 2026, Embraer — headquartered in Sao Jose dos Campos — posted the best first quarter in its history. Revenue: $1.4 billion. Growth: 31% year-on-year. Operating profit: up 52%. Backlog: $32.1...
It took a fixed-price contract, $1.8 billion in losses, two years of schedule slippage, a software fix for the fly-by-wire system, a redesigned ejection seat sequence, and more than a few tense program reviews — but Boeing's T-7A Red Hawk is finally going to be built...
Picture the most remote place you can reach on Earth. Not remote as in a long flight or a rough road — remote as in no road exists, no runway, no harbour that can handle most ships when the South Atlantic is in a mood. Now imagine a medical emergency breaking out...
Every profession has its internal language — the private jokes, the eye-rolls, the sarcastic notes passed between colleagues who understand each other completely. In aviation, that language lives in the aircraft logbook. Specifically, in the back-and-forth between the...
A U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet just did something that sounds like it belongs in a video game — and the Pentagon released video to prove it. On May 8, 2026, a Super Hornet from USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) dropped precision-guided munitions straight down the...
There is a shipping container somewhere in the world right now that does not look like much. Steel box. Corner castings. Maybe a dent or two from a rough crossing. You have seen a million of them stacked at ports, rolling down highways on flatbeds, rusting in fields....
There is something quietly momentous about a small nation on the North Sea becoming the first foreign partner in what may prove to be the most consequential transformation in air power since the jet age. On 23 April 2026, the United States Air Force and the...
The U.S. Air Force has officially launched the paperwork to start looking for something — anything — to replace the B-52 Stratofortress. The BUFF has been flying since 1952, and the Air Force's plan is apparently to keep flying it until the airframes are old enough to...
\n\nThe morning of May 6, 2026, was clear over the Culili Point sand dunes south of Laoag. A six-wheeled launcher — Japanese, bearing the roundel of the Ground Self-Defense Force — sat squat in the sand, its six canisters pointed west toward open water. At 10:30 a.m.,...
On 7 May 2026, South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) issued a declaration that aviation analysts had been watching for three years: the KF-21 Boramae is fully combat suitable. Three years of exhaustive testing. Six prototype airframes. More...
On the morning of 5 May 2026, in a vast exhibition hall on the European shore of Istanbul, something quietly extraordinary happened. Turkey's Ministry of National Defence unveiled — with little prior warning to the international press — a full-scale mockup of the...
There is a sound that no aviation fan forgets. A rising howl of twin Pratt & Whitney TF30s at full afterburner, the variable-geometry wings sweeping back as the jet accelerates from a carrier deck at a rate that seems almost physically offensive — as if physics...
On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And with that...
In August 1941, RAF Fighter Command began receiving reports it did not know how to explain. Spitfire pilots returning from sweeps over occupied France described a radial-engined fighter that could outrun, outclimb, and outroll everything they flew. At first, British...
\n\nIn the summer of 1941, roughly 300 American men — mostly military pilots and ground crew — quietly resigned their commissions, signed contracts with a fictional Chinese company, and boarded ships bound for Burma. They weren't soldiers. Not officially. They were...
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