Eckerlin was a professional footballer in Germany before transitioning to MMA, and says he taught Brighton players “wrestling, head control, hip control, and how to push back against opponents”.
Days before this interview with Eckerlin took place, the Seagulls moved up to third in the Premier League after beating champions and set-piece kings Arsenal 3-0.
Eckerlin is quick to play down the impact of his advice for the Brighton players, but admits his training “opened doors” for them.
“The Premier League is more physical, more aggressive, and they don’t know how to use their body,” Eckerlin told BBC Sport.
“Brighton sent me videos of how they defend, and they did nothing with their hips and arms.
“I taught them first in the weightlifting room, then the pitch, and it worked. This is what I did, I opened doors for them.”
Eckerlin was a professional footballer from 2005 to 2009, playing for SV Darmstadt in the third tier of German football at the peak of his career.
As a youngster, Eckerlin always wanted to play for the team he supports, Eintracht Frankfurt, but believed his dream was over when he left the sport.
Little did he know that MMA, and specifically European promotion Oktagon, would help make his dream of performing there come true.
In 2024, Eckerlin beat fellow German Christian Jungwirth at Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank Park in front of nearly 60,000 fans in the most-attended MMA event of the year.
On Saturday, Eckerlin returns to the stadium also known as the Waldstadion for a second time to face the Czech Republic’s David Kozma at Oktagon 94 with nearly 60,000 expected once again.
“It was my first dream, when I was in the Waldstadion when I was six or seven with my uncle. It was the dream for me to play there but I thought the fire went out,” says Eckerlin.
“I cannot tell you in words what this means to me. The biggest thing in my career. And now for the second time… crazy.
“I’m at the end of my career, I’m 39, so this is maybe my last fight. There’s no better way to stop fighting in my backyard, you know.”
It is stunning to see the impact the USAF’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program has made on discourse surrounding the future of the Air Force since it was officially announced. There is still much to prove regarding the concept, but testing is accelerating and the USAF now plans on buying 500 CCAs by 2032. At the same time, the USAF is now hunting for a successor to the MQ-9 Reaper, with plans on procuring hundreds of those drones, as well, by early in the next decade.
With all this in mind, TWZ’s Jamie Hunter talked to Mike Shortsleeve from General Atomics on the show floor at Air, Space & Cyber 2026. The two discussed the latest progress for the company’s newly-named FQ-42 Vengeance Collaborative Combat Aircraft, as well as General Atomics’ new Wildfire platform designed to address the lower-cost Massed Modular Aircraft program that could replace the company’s iconic MQ-9 Reaper.
Check out the interview below or at the top of this post.
FQ-42 Vengeance fighter drone update from General Atomics
U.S. Air Force Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) are set to take part in a large-force employment (LFE) exercise for the first time later this year. Sending CCAs to the next iteration of the Emerald Flag test exercise is another important new stepping stone toward fielding the drones operationally.
“We have not yet done a LFE with these [CCAs], for real. The first one is going to be Emerald Flag. That’s in December,” Lt. Col. Lyndon “OTTO” Bartlett, Director of Operations for the Experimental Operations Unit (EOU) at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, said earlier today. “That’ll be our first tip dip of the toe in an actual force integration.”
One of the Air Force’s YFQ-44A Fury CCA drones flies together with an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Anduril
It is worth noting here that Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, a CCA-type design, did take part in Valiant Shield 26, another LFE exercise, earlier this year. The EOU was also involved. However, the MQ-28, originally developed for the Royal Australian Air Force, is not officially part of the Air Force’s CCA program at present.
Emerald Flag in December “will, in OTTO’s mind, be the first time that we will ever do some CCA end-to-end chain [demonstration] live. That’s the first time we’ll ever be integrated in a fourth- and fifth-gen combined OCA [offensive counter air] push,” Lt. Col. Bartlett added. “It’ll be small, but those type [sic] of building blocks are where I think you get the intangibles like trust in the CCA.”
“Those learnings are going to be just as valuable as the technical, [like] does the radio work properly? Does the button I push to say ‘target’ work properly?” he continued.
A General Atomics YFQ-42A CCA drone during an earlier test flight. General Atomics
“If it’s in a simulated environment, it’s immediate,” Lt. Col. Bartlett said during the panel when asked about the “feedback loop” in testing the EOU is already taking part in. In that environment, “when the mission autonomy iterations are happening, our guys are literally with the programmers … They give the feedback, and if it’s possible to do immediately, they take that feedback. If not, then they work on it on the next turn of the software.”
Real-world testing, of course, offers opportunities to explore additional aspects of future CCA operations, including when it comes to loading weapons and maintenance. A key component of the Air Force’s vision for CCA employment is being able to forward deploy the drones to far-flung locations, including airstrips with limited infrastructure and access to logistics chains. Rapid, distributed deployments like this are central to still-evolving concepts of operations currently referred to collectively as Agile Combat Employment (ACE). The EOU has been involved in at least two rounds of ACE-focused testing this year, one at Edwards Air Force Base in California in April and another at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada in July. TWZ was the first to report on the latter event.
Visualizing ACE
During the panel today, Lt. Col. Bartlett also talked more generally about work EOU has done to date. This has included exploring “sortie generation, how easy they are to maintain, [and] how small a footprint could be.”
“We’ve been pleasantly surprised. The jets are extremely easy to maintain,” he continued. “We’re at a one-to-one maintainer-to-airplane ratio, which is crazy small.”
With “CCAs, [it] seems like because they’re a little bit simpler, because their role is so focused, what we found is that just about any – not just about, but we found that any AFSC [Air Force Specialty Code; alphanumeric codes used to identify specific jobs within this service] can be trained to generate sorties to load weapons, and we’ve done some of those things already,” he further explained. “It’s our job to bring them [CCAs] out and make sure that, beyond the technical specifications of it, that we’re kind of experimenting with the more complex things like logistics, and C2 [command and control], and how do we battle manage these things.”
Airmen prepare to load an inert AIM-120 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile onto a YFQ-44A CCA drone. USAF/Senior Airman Renee Blundon
The head of the EOU did acknowledge challenges that still have to be surmounted. This notably includes hurdles currently imposed by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations on the operation of fully uncrewed aircraft, even by the U.S. military, within U.S. airspace. This is further compounded by the explicit intention to operate CCAs with far more minimal human engagement compared to most existing drones.
“Mission autonomy is going to be the secret sauce that lets these things become decisive or not, and we’ll know that over the next couple years as that develops,” according to Bartlett. “If I were to identify the two biggest problems from the trenches of the EOU, [one] is FAA integration or policy implications to an autonomous airplane.”
“So these things don’t have pilots. They’re not RPAs [remotely-piloted aircraft]. They’re not manned fighters. They have no pilots,” he continued. “Our system is not set up for that, and that is a challenge that we are finding extremely hard to navigate through, and to not go around, but to make a policy.”
“We need to make sure the Air Force is ready for these things, to set policies that make sure the enterprise and the country is [sic] ready to receive these, and internalize an autonomous fighter that does not have a pilot that is running on a mission autonomy agent that doesn’t listen to ATC [air traffic control],” he added.
Another look at a YFQ-44A prototype during at test in 2026. USAF
The second problem, per Bartlett, is making sure the Air Force develops new internal policies and doctrine that are not “copy and pastes from old regulations” that do not take into account the specific nuances that CCAs will bring. What the service needs is “something that enables us to move quickly with these things, to weigh what we need, and to experiment with novel types of air superiority.”
All of this circles back to the discussion of trust in autonomous capabilities. It also speaks to the potential for future operations where CCAs could operate far more independently.
“It’s in the name that they’re collaborative,” Bartlett said. “Taking them out of that could technically be effective, but would not enhance the joint force the way that we see a collaborative, integrated force package to be.”
“What we need autonomously to do is written down. I won’t discuss the particulars in this forum, but we know what we need it to do, or we know what we think it really needs to do,” he noted. “We’ve structured our experimentation game plan to analyze ‘can it do those things?,’ and if not, then how do they need to be different? And then as they iterate on it, which we’ve already seen a couple times, we get that at the EOU, we get the new version down, we fly it again. Is it fixed? Yes or no.”
A General Atomics YFQ-42A seen from another angle during earlier testing. General Atomics
Some members of industry are clearly envisioning futures with different definitions of ‘collaborative’ that could lean more toward independent operations involving highly autonomous drones.
What “the whole entire program is trying to do is [figure out] what is the requirement to put out into the field to get to the warfighter and to start operating this thing this [sic; in] real time?” Robert “Otis” Winkler, Vice President of Corporate Development & National Security Programs at dronemaker Kratos, another one of the panelists, said. “The collaborative part of this makes it a much easier, I think, technical problem to be able to limit and grow the autonomy as you field this.”
“I think eventually we may see these aircraft utilized as collaborative aircraft, but not in conjunction with your traditional pulsed operation, but in support of that pulsed operation when the pulse isn’t there yet. But I do think that that is a bit of a stretch goal that’s going to be down the road.”
CCAs “have been designed really around increasing both survivability and lethality of current force packages. So there are many manned platforms that you would describe in the exact same fashion,” Jason Levin, Senior Vice President for Air Dominance and Strike at Anduril, who was also on the panel, said. He was responding here to a specific question about whether his use of the term “fighter” to describe these drones implied more emphasis on independent operations.
All of this underscores the importance of bringing CCAs to Emerald Flag in December, as well as other events in the future offering opportunities to see how the drones really fit in with other crewed platforms. The Air Force is hoping to start seeing CCAs enter operational service around the end of the decade, and have 500 of them, at least, in inventory by 2032.
During the panel today, the EOU’s Lt. Col. Bartlett made clear that “we’re going to learn a lot over the next couple years.”
AN emotional Celine Dion has been hailed a ‘true fighter’ as she sobbed through her return to stage after her battle with stiff-person syndrome.
The singer, 58, who was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune neurological disorder in 2022, is performing at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, tonight.
Emotional Celine Dion hailed ‘true fighter’ as she sobs through return to stage after battle with stiff-person syndromeCredit: APThe singer couldn’t control her emotions as she stood out on stageCredit: AP
According to Patient Info, SPS “is a very rare, long-term condition that causes painful muscle spasms and debilitating muscle stiffness”.
The singer, who was diagnosed with the rare autoimmune neurological disorder in 2022, is performing at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, west of Paris, tonightCredit: AFPThe star looked stunning in an all black maxi dress, silver necklace and her hair slicked backCredit: GettyCeline looked very emotional as she performed to her fansCredit: AFP
What is stiff person syndrome?
Stiff person syndrome or SPS is a condition caused by persistent spasms.
This usually involves multiple muscles, primarily the lower limbs, experts at University College London say.
Most people who develop the illness will receive a diagnosis from the ages of 40-60-years-old.
It’s a neurological disease with features of autoimmune conditions. The first signs would be intermittent spasms which then become continuous.
Other symptoms include:
Minor sensory stimuli (being more sensitive to noise, light and touch) Severe spasms
Impaired breathing (in advanced cases).
The experts said that spasms don’t usually occur during your sleep.
How is it treated?
In most cases people with SPS respond to high doses of diazepam, which is often used as anti anxiety medication.
Pain relievers will also improve the symptoms but these will not cure the disorder.
Many people with SPS will experience falls because they lack defensive reflexes, experts at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke added.
“I missed you. I’m going to sing like you without crying.”
Many rushed to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share their love and support towards the star.
One said: “You really did it Celine Dion! Thank you for coming back, you did better than ever legend.”
“What a come back! Celine Dion in Paris – powerful, emotional and simply unforgettable. A true legend,” another wrote.
A third added: “The best to ever do it has returned! Great to see Celine back after so many health challenges and she still sounds amazing.”
A fourth chimed in: “I admire her strength, her courage and her incredible talent.”
A fifth said: “So happy for Celine Dion. All she wanted is go back on stage. She did it. What a fighter!”
Celine will be performing another 25 shows at the arena.
Her last date this year is October 17, and then she will return next year in May for her remaining gigs.
It comes after she made her made her first public performance after revealing she is living with SPS when she closed the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris for the 2024 Olympics.
Some of Celine’s songs include My Heart Will Go On, The Power of Love and All By Myself.
France is accelerating work on the Rafale F5 standard, bringing forward development of a major new configuration of its combat aircraft at a time when the country’s planned next-generation fighter with Germany has effectively collapsed in its original form. The contracts cover the equipment judged to have the highest technical risk, ahead of the overall development contract for the F5 standard, expected for the end of this year.
The French defense procurement agency, the Direction générale de l’armement (DGA), ordered the first upstream development work for F5 from Dassault Aviation, Thales, MBDA, and Safran. The contracts cover key areas including navigation, datalinks, radar, electronic warfare, and propulsion, laying the groundwork for the next configuration of the Rafale, which is planned to enter service with the French Air and Space Force and the French Navy starting around 2033.
The most extensive modernization of the Rafale yet, the F5 standard was originally part of a longer transition toward France’s next-generation combat-air capability. But with the Franco-German New Generation Fighter (NGF) effort now effectively dead in its original configuration, the accelerated F5 program is taking on a much larger strategic role.
Concept artwork of the NGF future fighter. Dassault Aviation
Rather than simply keeping the Rafale relevant until NGF arrives, France is now developing a version of the aircraft that is set to carry much of the country’s high-end combat-air capability well into the 2030s and potentially beyond.
The increasingly capable F5 could, in turn, reduce the urgency of finding a replacement for the Rafale — while potentially adding to the fighter’s export appeal. After a slow start, Dassault has recorded export sales of 299 new-build Rafales to eight nations.
The DGA’s contracts engage four of France’s principal combat-aircraft industrial players. Dassault Aviation remains responsible for the aircraft and its overall integration; Thales is involved in major sensor, electronic warfare, and communications capabilities; MBDA is responsible for much of the weapons system; and Safran is responsible for propulsion.
The Rafale assembly line at the Dassault Aviation facility in Mérignac, France. Dassault Aviation – V. Almansa ALMANSA
Previous Rafale standards have largely consisted of incremental upgrades, focusing on software and other improvements to the existing aircraft configuration. F5 is notably more extensive, addressing many of the critical systems that determine how the aircraft senses the battlespace, communicates with other platforms, conducts electronic warfare, and generates the power needed to operate increasingly demanding equipment.
The DGA has specifically identified the Thales RBE2-XG radar as one of the major technological advances associated with F5.
The RBE2-XG is expected to feature gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors. Compared with previous technology, GaN generates less heat and has the capacity to operate at higher voltages, meaning that output power can be increased, while component size can be reduced. Overall, using GaN should help to get more power out of the radar without increasing its size.
According to the DGA, “This new radar will benefit from a substantial increase in power, and consequently in detection range, as well as improvements in the identification of targets with an extremely low radar cross-section (RCS). Its computing capabilities will also be enhanced to facilitate the integration of artificial intelligence.”
The RBE2-XG will also be “designed with collaborative combat in mind, featuring sensors capable of working together without the need for pilot intervention.” It is also planned to have enhanced resilience, including against cyber threats.
France is already working on the concept of a combat drone to accompany the Rafale, with the future F5 standard providing the crewed aircraft around which those systems can operate.
A Rafale during a test mission with a Dassault nEUROn combat drone demonstrator. Dassault Aviation – A. Pecchi
The new radar will be combined with more capable electronic warfare equipment, improved communications and datalinks, expanded processing capacity, and a more capable propulsion system.
To be developed by MBDA and Thales, the forthcoming F5 version of the SPECTRA self-protection suite is intended to significantly improve detection and jamming capabilities, the DGA says, “through a fully digital approach, enabling a complete overhaul of the core electronic warfare system to counter the increasing density and broadening of the threat spectrum, as well as the growing complexity of threat waveforms, expected by 2035.”
Thales à bord du Rafale de Dassault Aviation
Thales will also be responsible for the new Inter-Vehicle Data Link (IVDL) system, described as a “stealthy and resilient datalink.” The DGA says the new datalink will expand connectivity “thanks to a new high-speed, discreet, and jamming-resistant waveform. IVDL will allow the Rafale to penetrate hostile areas where jammers are widespread, while maintaining optimal quality of communication and dialogue between aircraft.”
Safran will begin preliminary design work on the M88 T-Rex engine, which is planned to increase the turbofan’s thrust from around 16,500 pounds to nearly 19,850 pounds, an increase of roughly 20 percent.
M88 T-REX: A 9-ton thrust predator serving the Rafale
In terms of armament, the contract announcement mentions the ASN4G missile, set to be introduced to service by 2035, which will allow the Rafale F5 to continue to serve as the airborne nuclear component. The munition remains in the early stages of development, but it will be capable of hypersonic speeds — defined as speeds greater than Mach 5 — with a range in excess of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).
Other likely new missiles include a beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile to succeed the current Meteor. As you can read about here, France’s Comet program, apparently led by the French side of MBDA, is already looking into this requirement, with an apparent plan to introduce the weapon around 2030.
An older video from MBDA showing some of the company’s weapons integrated on earlier versions of the Rafale:
PARIS AIR SHOW 2021: MISSILES ON THE RAFALE
For France, the original logic behind the pan-European FCAS program was that Rafale would eventually give way to the NGF as its principal crewed combat aircraft, operating from land bases and aircraft carriers.
With the collapse of the Franco-German effort, France cannot simply wait for a next-generation fighter program whose industrial and political future is uncertain. Instead, the Rafale has to remain capable against rapidly evolving threats throughout the 2030s and beyond.
With the F5 standard, however, France is looking to incorporate some of the concepts envisaged for NGF. These include distributed architectures in which crewed fighters, uncrewed aircraft, remote carriers, missiles, and offboard sensors cooperate across a battlespace.
The nEUROn drone and a Rafale M in flight over the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, during tests to investigate the use of a UCAV in a naval context. Dassault Aviation – A. Pecchi
For now, F5 also sidesteps the central problem in the now-defunct Franco-German effort: whether the two countries could agree on the requirements, industrial structure, and workshare behind a new-generation combat aircraft.
Despite its advances, the F5 airframe remains derived from a design dating back to the 1980s, which first entered French service in the early 2000s. In particular, it falls well short of fifth-generation designs — let alone sixth-generation ones — in terms of low observability. This is one area where collaborative drones could potentially help compensate for the Rafale’s inherent limitations.
France has therefore bought itself some time with the F5 program. But it may eventually decide that it needs a future high-end crewed fighter to provide capabilities that an upgraded fourth-generation airframe cannot fully replicate, particularly in terms of survivability against advanced integrated air-defense systems, signature reduction, internal weapons carriage, and operations deep inside heavily contested airspace.
On an industrial level, F5 is also significant because it brings together the same French industrial heavyweights that would have formed the backbone of its FCAS effort. Dassault Aviation, Thales, Safran, and MBDA are now well-positioned to work together on whatever comes after F5, whether that is a crewed combat aircraft, uncrewed CCA-type platforms, or a combination of both. Based on its experience with the nEUROn program, France would be well placed to develop a UCAV that can work cooperatively as well as independently, taking over the deeper-penetrating fighter mission set, and potentially skipping a sixth-generation fighter altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNsu7g7r94
Meanwhile, success with F5 — and, in particular, with the wider combat ecosystem planned around it — could put France in an even stronger position when it comes to any future European fighter project.
For the time being, Britain, Italy, and Japan are pursuing the GCAP/Tempest pathway toward a new combat aircraft. Germany and Spain remain tied to the wider FCAS architecture, even as the original Franco-German NGF arrangement has fractured. Sweden’s position is less clear, with indications that it could collaborate with either France or Germany.
France, for its part, is now investing heavily in an increasingly sophisticated Rafale architecture while maintaining its own sovereign industrial base.
In terms of acqusition, France is expected to pursue a mixed approach, buying new-build Rafales while upgrading suitable aircraft already in service to the F5 standard. The oldest jets are unlikely to receive the full F5 treatment, however.
The irony is that the failure of the NGF effort may ultimately make Rafale F5 more important — and potentially more capable — than it was ever expected to be.
