Over the past 80 years, the air forces of the world have ripped through the skies in five generations of jet fighters. The common denominator of all five generations is the jet engine, an invention so revolutionary that the U.S. didn’t construct a single fighter with propellers after the technology had been proven.
The jet engine unlocked incredible performance, allowing fighters to finally pierce the sound barrier, carry payloads of bombs once reserved for heavy bombers, and soar to the sting of space. Here’s the history of all five generations and the one to return: the sixth-generation fighter.
1942 | 1st Generation: Comets and Shooting Stars
In 1941, the primary Allied jet-powered aircraft, the British Gloster E.28/39, was demonstrated in secrecy to U.S. Army Air Force officials, who then directed American industry to develop a jet fighter of its own. In a crash program, Bell Aircraft developed the P-59 Airacomet, America’s first jet aircraft. The Airacomet was developed in great secrecy, a lot in order that Bell laid tarps over the fuselage to cover the plane’s huge air intakes—a feature only present in jet aircraft—and mounted a fake propeller to the nose. The aircraft flew in October 1942 but never saw combat.
The Airacomet was quickly followed by one other plane, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star. The P-80 was also developed on a compressed time-frame, starting development in 1943, with first flight in 1944. The Shooting Star was the primary plane to exceed 500 mph in level flight, eventually reaching as much as 580 mph. The plane was developed as a high-altitude interceptor, its jet engines allowing it to achieve a height advantage over prop-driven aircraft, then pounce on them from above. The P-80 flew only a handful of reconnaissance missions in Europe before VE Day but saw extensive combat within the Korean War. The P-80 was a guns-only aircraft, mounting six .50 caliber machine guns within the nose.
1958 | 2nd Generation: Dawn of the Jet + Missile
The North American F-86 Sabre was not the primary American jet fighter, but it surely was the primary jet fighter armed with air-to-air missiles, a powerhouse combination that also dominates today. The was enormously successful, with nearly 10,000 aircraft built and flown with 30 countries worldwide, including each the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. The F-86 is taken into account a second-generation fighter jet, trailing wartime jets just like the Me262 and Meteor by just a number of years.
In 1958, F-86 fighters of the Republic of China Air Force were involved in aerial skirmishes with People’s Liberation Army Air Force MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters over the Taiwan Strait. Under Operation Black Magic, the Air Force sent twenty F-86s fitted to hold AIM-9B Sidewinder infrared guided air-to-air missiles to Taiwan. Taiwanese pilots claimed a complete of 25 Sidewinder kills against the MiGs, disrupting 50 years of gun vs. gun air combat.
1961 | third Generation: The Jet Engine Fully Realized
In U.S. military service between 1961 and 1996, the F-4 Phantom was the promise of the trendy jet engine delivered. The J-79 jet engine, exponentially more powerful than the radial engine, made for faster fighters that would carry bomb loads greater than World War II bombers. The F-4 was a multi-role aircraft able to functioning within the air superiority, strike, close-air support, reconnaissance, and air defense suppression roles. The F-4 was considered a third-generation fighter jet.
The F-4 Phantom debuted just 16 years after the top of World War II. With a top speed of 1,711 mph, the F-4 was 4 times faster than the legendary P-51D Mustang and will fly twice as high, to a maximum altitude of 60,000 feet. Even though it weighed lower than half as much because the B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber it could carry 50 percent more munitions, as much as a combined load of 18,000 kilos of bombs, missiles, and sensor pods. The F-4 did all this with a crew of two, nine fewer crew members than the B-29.
1964 | The Swing Wing
One in every of the best innovations in aviation throughout the Cold War was the variable geometry wing, or “swing wing.” A plane with wings angled forward had superior handling characteristics at lower speeds, while wings angled rearward was superior for high-speed flight. The swing wing allowed engineers to design a plane that enjoyed one of the best of each worlds, a plane with wings mounted on hinges that allowed them to be angled forward or rearward in flight.
The primary American swing wing aircraft was the F-111 “Aardvark,” a fighter bomber design that ultimately specialized in low-altitude bombing runs. The second aircraft was the long-lasting F-14 Tomcat, which took off and landed with wings forward and dashed to intercept enemy planes with wings swept back. Swing wings regularly fell out of favor, resulting from their weight and mechanical complexity, replaced with computer-aided controls.
1971 | Vertical Takeoff and Landing
In 1971, the U.S. Marine Corps took delivery of the world’s first vertical takeoff and landing fighter. The AV-8A Harrier, developed by the U.K.’s Hawker Siddeley, was powered by a Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine that would vector thrust horizontally, vertically, or any angle in-between. The result was a novel fighter that wasn’t reliant on airport runways, could operate from U.S. Navy amphibious ships, and was highly maneuverable in a dogfight.
The AV-8A Harrier was eventually replaced by the more capable AV-8B Harrier II. The Marine Corps became so wedded to the concept of short or vertical takeoff fighters it insisted on a special version of the F-35 Lightning II, the F-35B, with similar characteristics.
1978 | 4th Generation: The Gen That Won’t Go Away
The Vietnam War took a heavy toll on U.S. fighter aircraft. The American wartime experience, which saw large, lumbering, third-generation jets underperform in visual range dogfights with North Vietnamese fighter jets, resulted in fighters just like the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which debuted in 1978. The F-16 combined high thrust-to-weight ratios with exceptional maneuverability to create a dogfighter with few equals.
The addition of precision-guided munitions, directed by a navigation/targeting pod, updated radars, and recent, improved air-to-air missiles similar to the AIM-9L Sidewinder and AIM-120 AMRAAM, have kept fourth-generation planes relevant for much longer than previous generations. Today, 45 years because the first F-16A entered service, the aircraft continues to be in production, with recent F-16Vs are rolling off assembly lines in South Carolina.
1983 | Stealth
Forty years ago, the concept of radar-evading aircraft was considered a dream. Heavy aircraft losses throughout the Vietnam War prompted the query: what if a plane may very well be built that was undetectable on radar? An aircraft, its exterior fastidiously crafted to cut back radar reflections and coated with a radar-absorbing paint, could in theory slip through enemy defenses without alerting them. Paired with laser-guided bombs, such an aircraft couldn’t only achieve a high level of bombing accuracy but in addition survivability.
Unbeknown to the dreamers of 1983, a stealth “fighter” was already flying in secret. The F-117A Nighthawk, developed, built, and flown in total secrecy, was operating out of the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada. Fifty-nine aircraft were eventually built, their first taste of combat being the invasion of Panama in 1989. The F-117A later flew in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the U.N. intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
2005 | fifth Generation: Raptors & Company
Within the late Nineteen Eighties, the Advanced Technology Fighter program got down to field a brand new fighter to interchange the F-15 Eagle. This recent fighter could be the primary air-to-air fighter to include stealth from the bottom up, Pratt & Whitney F119 engines powerful enough to permit it to cruise above the speed of sound, and an lively electronically scanned array radar that would detect enemy targets at long ranges. The tip of the Cold War slowed development, however the fighter—the F-22 Raptor—debuted in 2005.
As the primary fifth-generation fighter, the F-22’s characteristics would come to define the generation. The F-22 was followed by the Chinese Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon,” the Sukhoi Su-57, and the American F-35 Lightning II, all of which share the F-22’s feature set. Only 195 F-22s were ever built.
2020 | sixth Generation
The F-22 and F-35 were developed during a time of relative peace, and in consequence, each took greater than a decade to go from the drafting board to the hangar. Increased competition with Russia and China, each of whom have developed their very own fifth-generation fighters, have led the Air Force and the Navy to start work on the primary sixth-generation fighters. The services are designing their very own, separate fighter jets, each called Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD).
In September 2020, the Air Force revealed it had designed, tested, and flown a prototype NGAD fighter jet. Three years later, we still don’t know what it looks like, or what it’s able to. Even though it’s still early, likely features that may define sixth-generation fighters will include multipurpose, reconfigurable radars, pilotless combat drones that act as robotic wingmen, and adaptive cycle engines that may optimize for speed or fuel efficiency on the press of a button.