Recently in Aircraft Category

Uzbekistan Airways is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a shiny new present, a Boeing 767-300ER. This is the first of four 767-300ERs from a 2008 order. Uzbekistan Airways, headquartered in Tashkent, also has two 787-8s on order.

Spanish carrier Air Nostrum has taken delivery of its 75th Bombardier aircraft - a CRJ1000 - at a ceremony in Mirabel, Canada. It follows previous deliveries of nine CRJ1000s (part of an order for 35 of the type), 11 CRJ900s, and 35 CRJ200 regional jets, as well as 19 Q300 turboprops. It's one of just two customers for the CRJ1000, whose backlog - as of 31 October - stood at 32 aircraft (which is now at least down to 28). The overall CRJ backlog, meanwhile, was a dwindling 52 aircraft.

Credit: Bombardier

Replete with dragon motif - to celebrate the Chinese Year of the Dragon - this Airbus A320, the carrier's 100th (registration - we think - 9M-AQM, although that's listed in our database as a 1972-vintage Boeing 737-200 that was parked in 2008) arrived in AirAsia's fleet earlier this week. According to the press bumf, it took a team of 1,000s of painters, a billion hours to complete it (although to be honest, I might have skimmed that bit).

Credit: AirAsia

With yesterday's announcement that the Dassault Rafale has been selected for India's MMRCA fighter contest, I thought it timely to use this picture of the aircraft from Flightglobal's Airspace gallery. Of course it might have been more apt to have a picture of a Eurofighter in a nose dive, given its current sales figures.

Credit: Zhukovsky gallery on Flightglobal Airspace

Forgive us - but when confronted with a press release jam-packed with acronyms (TTH, DGA, NAHEMA, ALAT etc) the will to live is quickly eroded. Nonetheless, we present to you the first NH Industries NH90 Tactical Troop Transport in final operational configuration for the French armed forces. And yes, that's a TTH in FOC to you.

Credit: Eurocopter

Here, from Flightglobal's AirSpace gallery, is a lovely image from last week's Bahrain air show of a (repetitively named) Bahrain Air Airbus A320 doing its stuff with the tail of a Sukhoi Su-27 of the Russian Knights display team in the foreground.

It's exceptionally cheesy, it's very Top Gun, but hell, it's Friday - here's a shot of the Lockheed Martin on its first night flight.

Credit: Lockheed Martin

Via our Israeli correspondent, Arie Egozi, comes this image of Greek air force Northrop Grumman F-16s, Israeli air force Boeing F-15s and an IAF Boeing 707 tanker on exercise above Israel back in November. In all, five Greek F-16s took part, flying from the IAF's base at Uvda in southern Israel and performing a five-day exercise, which included practice dogfights as well as ground attacks.

Credit: IAF Magazine

Here's a nice shot from the US Air Force site of a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit bomber over Pasadena in California earlier this month.

Credit: US Air Force

To borrow from Spinal Tap: How much more black could it be? None more black. It's Air New Zealand's latest Boeing 777-300ER (ZK-OKQ) resplendent in the All Black colour scheme sat next to a Beech 1900D turboprop belonging to Eagle Airways at Auckland. Could it be any more awesome? None more awesome.

Credit: Peter Clark