Airports around the world are quietly repainting their runways. Not because the paint is fading — because the numbers are wrong. Magnetic north is drifting, and the compass heading that defined a runway when it was built twenty or thirty years ago no longer matches...
Update: This article provides the latest on the investigation into the Lufthansa 787 nose gear collapse at Frankfurt Airport. For our initial coverage, see Brand-New Lufthansa 787 Drops on Its Nose. Germany's Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) has...
The Air Force wants $3.2 billion more than its current budget to fix aircraft that are breaking faster than they can be repaired. Vice Chief Gen. John Lamontagne told lawmakers that the service's demand for new airplanes is outstripping contractors' ability to produce...
Two lieutenant colonels at Joint Base San Antonio just became the most important instructor pilots in the U.S. Air Force. On 4 June 2026, Lt. Col. Michael Trott and Lt. Col. Phillip Bourquin of the 99th Flying Training Squadron qualified as the first Air Education and...
For decades, the global fighter market had two aisles: American and Russian. You bought F-16s or you bought MiG-29s. China was a buyer, not a seller — importing Russian engines, Israeli avionics, and Western design philosophy to build aircraft it could not yet export....
France's ambassador to Sweden has confirmed what defence analysts suspected and Kyiv desperately hoped: Dassault Rafale F4 fighters will join the Ukrainian Air Force. The announcement, made by Ambassador Thierry Carlier in early June 2026, places the most capable...
In a closed-door meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, a senior Pentagon official told European allies what many had feared but few expected so bluntly: the United States is pulling a third of its fighter jets out of NATO's crisis-response pool, withdrawing every...
The Air Force wanted the A-10 dead by 2026. Congress just told them to keep it alive until at least 2030 — and to maintain the training pipeline, the Weapons School billets, and the testing infrastructure the service had already started dismantling. The Warthog...
Two F-35Bs rolled out of Fleet Readiness Center East at Cherry Point with new brains, new eyes, and new reflexes. Airframes BF-105 and BF-88 are the first operational Lightning IIs to receive the Technology Refresh-3 retrofit — the hardware backbone that transforms a...
A Rafale punched through Mach 1 over the DGA missile test range on 1 June, opened its weapons bay logic, and released an MICA NG infrared missile into air heated to several hundred degrees by the shockwave. The seeker locked. The missile guided. France just proved its...
At 9:04 in the morning Eastern time, mission control in Houston sent four people in orbit an instruction no astronaut wants to hear: get into your spacecraft, put on your suits, and be ready to leave. Not for a drill. Because the International Space Station is losing...
Update, June 5, 2026: Project Fear has released the full video — now embedded below. On the evening of June 2, a YouTube channel best known for sleeping in haunted asylums posted a single thermal-camera frame and lit the aviation internet on fire. The image, captured...
The morning of 1 March 1945 broke cold and foggy over the Heuberg training ground in Baden-Württemberg. While the men waited for the cloud to lift, a 22-year-old pilot named Lothar Sieber stood in a clearing getting last-minute advice from two engineers, the...
On the afternoon of 14 May 1961, in a tin control shed on a stretch of Nevada desert called Jackass Flats, a group of Lawrence Livermore engineers held their breath. Two miles away, bolted to a railroad flatcar and painted fire-engine red, sat a machine no one had...
It was a clear winter morning over the Costa del Sol, the kind where the Mediterranean glitters like hammered tin. At 10:30 on 17 January 1966, the villagers of Palomares — tomato farmers, mostly, in a corner of Almería so dry the fields had to be coaxed...
The Florida evening smelled of pine resin and rocket smoke. On a cracked, disused runway deep in the Eglin reservation — Wagner Field, the same strip where Doolittle's raiders once practised short takeoffs — a four-engine Hercules sat bristling with thirty...
The missile is pink. That is the first thing you notice in the test footage Ukrainian manufacturer Fire Point released this week: a bright flamingo-pink rocket leaping off its launcher and carving through a “fully controlled maneuvering flight.” The colour...
English