The Pictorial History of Fighter Aircraft

Fighter aircraft and their pilots are the knights on grand steeds of the aerial battlefield. This was just as true in skies over Europe in 1914 as it is in the skies of the Middle East or other such world trouble spots.

In terms of speed and power, fighters have always been on the leading edge of aviation technology. These planes and their pilots also operate—as always—on the leading edge of danger, in that rarified environment where the heat of battle meets the cool nerves that are essential to survival.

Fighters can be—and frequently have been—adapted to a variety of roles, but their raison d’etre is fighting other airplanes. Like the mounts ridden by the knights of the Middle Ages, and indeed like the knights themselves, fighters are bred to fight, bred to win.

A fighter aircraft must serve its pilot almost as though it were an extension of his hand and mind. It must give the pilot the maximum in clean unobstructed vision. In World War 1, the pilot sat in an open cockpit with a very good view of the entire hemisphere above him. Over the years, the cockpit became more and more enclosed until, by the early 1940s, the pilot’s field of view was compromised by a lattice-work grid. By the 1970s, however, advancements in Plexiglas technology caught up, and bubble canopies (including one-piece bubble canopies on American F-I6s) reappeared. To become an extension of the pilot himself, the fighter airplane not only must give him a clear field of view, it must give him a clear field of action. It must respond instantly to his every whim. To do this, it must be very maneuverable; and to be very maneuverable a fighter must be very unstable. Stability is the characteristic most sought for the airliners in which most people travel, but the chariot of the fighter pilot must be just the opposite—unstable to the point of being almost dangerous yet capable of spins, loops and power dives that no airliner would ever undertake.

Like the medieval knight with whom we have compared him, the fighter pilot is a specialized breed. So is his airplane. They fly and fight in a world far removed from the rest of the battlefield. It is a distant yet deadly world where survival depends on a pilot’s ability to apply his skills in one-on-one com-bat against someone who aspires to the very same skills. In this world, the pilot’s only assets are his own ability to do his job with speed and precision, and the ability of his steed to respond to, and support, him.

This is the story—in pictures and words of the successive generations of airplanes that have been the outposts on the leading edge of aviation technology, the silver birds that have carried successive generations of the twentieth century’s most daring aerial warriors.