September 2026 will be remembered as the month when two more European air forces crossed from paper contracts into metal on the ramp. Finland’s first two F-35As landed at Rovaniemi on 18 September after a ferry flight from Fort Worth via the Azores. The same week, Germany formally accepted its first Lightning II at Lockheed Martin’s Texas plant. Poland had already done both things months earlier: its first three Husarz jets touched down at Łask on 22 May, five more followed in late August, and eight aircraft now sit on Polish soil while another eight remain in Arkansas for training. Together the three programmes illustrate how Foreign Military Sales schedules, training pipelines in the United States, and domestic basing work in practice rather than in press releases.