The History of U.S. Military Aircraft

The Wright Military Flyer was the world's first military aircraft purchased by any government. Built by the Wright brothers to an Army specification calling for a two-seat machine capable of 40 miles per hour, it was accepted on August 2, 1909, for $30,000, which included a $5,000 bonus for exceeding the required speed.

It was a canard biplane: the horizontal control surface sat in front of the pilot, the two pusher propellers were driven by bicycle chains from a single engine, and there was no cockpit, wheels, or brakes. It launched from a rail, sometimes assisted by a falling-weight catapult, and landed on skids.

An earlier version had crashed during 1908 trials at Fort Myer, Virginia, killing Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first fatality in a powered airplane, and badly injuring Orville Wright. The 1909 trials, flown after repairs and redesign, succeeded.

The single aircraft trained the Army's first handful of pilots before being retired in 1911. The Wrights donated it to the Smithsonian, where it hangs in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

The Curtiss JN-4, universally called the 'Jenny,' was the aircraft on which the great majority of American and Canadian pilots learned to fly during World War I. Roughly 6,800 were built, more than any other American aircraft of the era.

A forgiving two-seat biplane with the instructor and student in tandem open cockpits, the Jenny was docile enough to survive the mistakes of a beginner. It was powered by the Curtiss OX-5, a 90-horsepower V-8 that was reliable by the standards of 1917 but still prone to failure.

An earlier variant, the JN-3, had equipped the 1st Aero Squadron during the 1916 Punitive Expedition into Mexico, where the type's limited power and fragility in desert conditions were exposed.

After the war the government sold thousands of surplus Jennys for a few hundred dollars each. They became the standard mount of the 1920s 'barnstormers,' the traveling stunt fliers who introduced much of rural America to the airplane.

The SPAD S.XIII was the principal fighter flown by American squadrons in World War I, because the United States could not field a competitive fighter of its own design before the November 1918 armistice.

A French design, it was a sturdy wood-and-fabric biplane powered by a 220-horsepower Hispano-Suiza V-8, armed with two synchronized machine guns firing through the propeller arc. It was fast in a dive and rugged, but heavy on the controls and unforgiving at low speed.

Captain Eddie Rickenbacker scored most of his 26 credited victories in SPADs with the 94th Aero Squadron, the 'Hat in the Ring' unit. Frank Luke, the 'Arizona Balloon Buster,' flew one until his death in September 1918.

American factories were tooling up to build SPADs and other types under license when the war ended, and the contracts were cancelled. The experience drove home how far U.S. aviation industry lagged its allies.

The DH-4 was a license-built American version of a British Airco bomber, re-engineered around the new American 400-horsepower Liberty L-12 engine. It was the only U.S.-built combat aircraft to reach the Western Front in significant numbers, about 1,200 by the armistice.

Crews criticized the placement of the fuel tank between the pilot and observer, which could trap the crew or feed a fire in a crash; the nickname 'flaming coffin' attached to the type, though later analysis found its fire record was not unusually bad.

After the war the DH-4 became the workhorse of the Army Air Service and of the fledgling U.S. Air Mail, which flew rebuilt DH-4s on the first transcontinental routes through the early 1920s.

Repeatedly modernized with welded steel fuselages and better equipment, some DH-4s were still in Army service as late as 1932, an unusually long life for a design of 1916.

The P-26 was the U.S. Army's first all-metal monoplane fighter and its first fighter built by Boeing in quantity. It entered service in 1934 as a clear break from the wood-and-wire biplanes that came before.

It was still a transitional aircraft: the pilot sat in an open cockpit, the landing gear was fixed in streamlined 'trousers,' and the wings were braced with external wire. Its landing speed was high enough that the Army added wing flaps after early accidents, and a taller headrest after several pilots died in nose-over landings.

Powered by a 500-horsepower Pratt & Whitney radial, the 'Peashooter' could reach about 234 miles per hour, fast for 1934 but slow by the time war came.

Philippine Army Air Corps P-26s were among the first Allied aircraft to engage Japanese fighters in December 1941, and a Filipino pilot is credited with downing a Japanese aircraft in one.

The Martin B-10 was the first all-metal monoplane bomber to go into regular service with the Army Air Corps, and when it appeared in 1934 it was faster than any pursuit fighter then in U.S. service, about 210 miles per hour.

It introduced a package of features that quickly became standard: retractable landing gear, an enclosed cockpit, an internal bomb bay, and a rotating nose gun turret, the first on an American bomber.

General Henry Arnold led a flight of ten B-10s on a 8,290-mile round trip from Washington to Alaska and back in 1934, a widely publicized demonstration of the bomber's range and reliability.

The B-10 made every biplane bomber in the world obsolete almost overnight, but aircraft development was so rapid in the 1930s that it was itself outdated by the time the B-17 and B-18 entered service a few years later.

The B-17 was the aircraft most associated with the American daylight bombing campaign over Europe. A four-engine bomber bristling with up to 13 heavy machine guns, it was designed to fly in tight defensive formations deep into enemy territory without fighter escort.

That doctrine proved costly. On the second Schweinfurt raid in October 1943, 60 of 291 B-17s were shot down and many more written off, loss rates that could not be sustained until long-range escort fighters arrived.

The bomber was famous for absorbing punishment. Aircraft returned with engines out, control surfaces shredded, and large sections of structure missing. Its Norden bombsight was treated as a top secret and promised a precision it rarely achieved in combat conditions.

12,731 were built. The type also served in the Pacific, in maritime patrol, and in air-sea rescue, and a handful flew on into the 1950s as transports and drones.

The P-51 began as a design North American Aviation produced for Britain in 1940. With its original Allison engine it was a capable low-altitude fighter but fell off badly at height.

Fitting the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, license-built in the United States by Packard, transformed it. The Merlin-powered P-51B and later P-51D had the speed and high-altitude performance to match German fighters and, crucially, the range.

With external drop tanks the Mustang could escort heavy bombers from England to Berlin and back, roughly 1,600 miles round trip. From early 1944 that ended the Luftwaffe's ability to defend German airspace, and air superiority over the D-Day beaches was won before the invasion.

The Mustang served in Korea as a ground-attack aircraft under the designation F-51, flew with dozens of air forces into the 1980s, and remains among the most sought-after warbirds in private hands.

The P-47 was the largest and heaviest single-engine, single-seat piston fighter ever mass-produced, weighing nearly eight tons loaded. It was built around a big Pratt & Whitney R-2800 radial engine and a turbosupercharger housed in the rear fuselage.

That size made it a poor low-speed turner but an outstanding high-altitude fighter, a superb diver, and an extremely durable gun platform with eight .50-caliber machine guns.

As Mustangs took over the long-range escort role, the 'Jug' shifted to ground attack. In the months after D-Day, P-47s roamed over France and Germany destroying locomotives, trucks, tanks, and bridges, and its ability to bring pilots home after heavy battle damage became legendary.

More than 15,600 were built, more than any other American fighter. The type equipped Allied air forces including the Free French and Brazilian squadrons in Italy.

The twin-boom, twin-engine P-38 looked like nothing else in the sky. Lockheed built it to a demanding 1937 Army specification for a high-altitude interceptor, and it was the only American fighter in continuous production from before Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.

Its two turbosupercharged Allison engines gave it long range and a heavy nose-mounted battery of four machine guns and a cannon that fired straight ahead without the convergence problems of wing guns.

P-38s flew the mission that killed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, intercepting his transport over Bougainville in April 1943 after codebreakers revealed his itinerary. The top two American aces of the war, Richard Bong with 40 victories and Thomas McGuire with 38, both flew Lightnings in the Pacific.

Stripped of guns and fitted with cameras, the F-4 and F-5 photo-reconnaissance versions flew a large share of Allied aerial mapping and pre-strike photography in every theater.

The Vought F4U Corsair is instantly recognizable by its inverted gull wing, shaped that way to give a very large propeller ground clearance while keeping the landing gear short. It was among the fastest fighters of the war, the first U.S. single-engine fighter to exceed 400 miles per hour in level flight.

Early carrier trials went badly. Poor forward visibility over the long nose and a tendency to bounce on landing led the Navy to send the first Corsairs to Marine Corps land bases in the Pacific while the British navy worked out carrier techniques the U.S. later adopted.

From island airfields in the Solomons, Marine Corsair squadrons, including Gregory 'Pappy' Boyington's 'Black Sheep,' ran up a claimed kill ratio of about 11 to 1 against Japanese aircraft.

The Corsair outlasted the war. It flew ground-attack missions in Korea, and Vought kept it in production until 1953, the longest production run of any American piston-engine fighter. France flew Corsairs until 1964, and the last Corsair combat came in the 1969 'Football War' between Honduras and El Salvador.

The B-29 was a generational leap: a pressurized cabin that let the crew fly in shirtsleeves above 30,000 feet, remote-controlled gun turrets aimed through a central fire-control computer, and the range to strike Japan from island bases 1,500 miles away.

Its development cost roughly $3 billion, exceeding the Manhattan Project, and it was rushed into service with unresolved problems, chiefly a tendency for its Wright R-3350 engines to overheat and catch fire.

High-altitude precision bombing of Japan produced disappointing results, so in early 1945 General Curtis LeMay ordered low-level night attacks with incendiaries. The March 9 to 10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo killed an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people in a single night.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the B-29s Enola Gay and Bockscar dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war the B-29 formed the initial nuclear striking force of the new Strategic Air Command and served in Korea before retiring in 1960.

The North American F-86 Sabre was the first American fighter with a swept wing, an aerodynamic feature copied from wartime German research that delayed the drag rise near the speed of sound.

It became famous over Korea, where it was the only United Nations aircraft able to meet the Soviet-built MiG-15 on roughly equal terms. The two dueled over 'MiG Alley' near the Yalu River in history's first large-scale jet-versus-jet combat.

The MiG could climb higher and carried heavier cannon; the Sabre had better high-speed handling, a radar-ranging gunsight, and, on the U.S. side, a core of experienced pilots. The Air Force's wartime claim of a roughly 10-to-1 advantage has been revised downward by later research, but the Sabre is still credited with controlling the contested airspace.

Beyond Korea, the Sabre was license-built in several countries and served with more than 25 air forces, making it one of the most widely used Western fighters of the early Cold War.

The B-47 looked radical when it flew in 1947: a thin, sharply swept wing carrying six turbojets in underwing pods, a fighter-style bubble canopy, and landing gear in the fuselage with outrigger wheels on the wings because the wing was too thin to house it.

That configuration, swept wing plus podded engines slung ahead of and below it, became the template for essentially every large jet aircraft built since, military or civilian.

More than 2,000 were built, and through the 1950s the B-47 was the numerical backbone of Strategic Air Command's nuclear force, flying from bases in the United States, Britain, Morocco, and Spain, often refueled in the air.

It was demanding to fly and had a thin safety margin, and it was replaced fairly quickly by the intercontinental B-52. No B-47 ever dropped a bomb in combat, though reconnaissance versions flew provocative missions near and sometimes into Soviet airspace.

The eight-engine B-52 entered service in 1955 as an intercontinental nuclear bomber and, more than 70 years later, is still flying frontline missions. The Air Force plans to operate re-engined B-52s past 2050, which would give some airframes a service life approaching a century.

During the Cold War, B-52s stood nuclear alert on runways and, for years, in the air around the clock. In Vietnam they were adapted to conventional carpet bombing: 'Arc Light' strikes dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs, and the 11-day 'Linebacker II' campaign of December 1972 sent them against Hanoi, where 15 were shot down.

Later the B-52 became a standoff missile carrier, launching cruise missiles from outside enemy air defenses, and a heavy conventional bomber in the 1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Its longevity comes from sheer capacity, low operating cost compared with stealth bombers, and a roomy airframe that has absorbed decades of new engines, radars, and weapons. Current upgrades include new commercial engines and a modern radar under the designation B-52J.

Built in secret by Lockheed's Skunk Works, the U-2 is essentially a jet-powered glider, with a long, thin, high-aspect-ratio wing that lets it cruise above 70,000 feet, where the air is too thin for conventional aircraft and, in the 1950s, above the reach of Soviet defenses.

That margin of safety proved thinner than hoped. On May 1, 1960, a Soviet surface-to-air missile brought down the U-2 flown by CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers near Sverdlovsk, wrecking a planned U.S.-Soviet summit and ending manned overflights of the USSR.

U-2 photographs identified Soviet missile sites in Cuba in October 1962, triggering the Cuban Missile Crisis, during which another U-2 was shot down over the island, killing its pilot.

The U-2 is extremely difficult to fly, stalling and overspeeding only a few knots apart at altitude, and it lands with a chase car calling out height to the pilot. Repeatedly upgraded, it remains in Air Force service into the 2020s.

The SR-71 was designed by Lockheed's Skunk Works under Clarence 'Kelly' Johnson to do what the U-2 could not: survive over hostile territory by flying too fast and too high to be hit. It cruised above Mach 3 at 85,000 feet.

Roughly 92 percent of its structure was titanium, needed to withstand skin temperatures of several hundred degrees from air friction. The United States lacked a domestic supply, so the CIA arranged to buy the metal through front companies from its main source, the Soviet Union.

The airframe was built deliberately loose because it expanded in flight; on the ground its fuel tanks leaked until friction heat sealed them. Its evasive maneuver against a missile launch was simply to accelerate and climb away.

In 24 years of operations no SR-71 was lost to enemy action, though crews were fired on with more than 4,000 surface-to-air missiles. Twelve of the 32 built were lost in accidents. It still holds the official speed and altitude records for an air-breathing crewed aircraft, set in 1976.

The F-4 Phantom II began as a U.S. Navy fleet-defense interceptor and was so capable that the Air Force and Marine Corps adopted it too, an unusual case of one airframe serving all three services. It was big, fast at over Mach 2, and could carry a heavy load of missiles and bombs.

In Vietnam it did everything: air-to-air combat, ground attack, reconnaissance, and defense suppression. Early on, its missile-only armament was a liability in close dogfights against smaller MiGs, and later Air Force models added an internal 20-millimeter cannon.

Poor missile performance and kill ratios in the late 1960s prompted the Navy to create its 'Top Gun' Fighter Weapons School in 1969 and the Air Force to overhaul its training. Results improved markedly.

More than 5,000 were built. The Phantom flew with 11 other nations, and the last U.S. examples, radar-jamming 'Wild Weasel' F-4Gs, served until 1996. Some remain in service abroad well into the 21st century.

The F-105 Thunderchief was the largest single-seat, single-engine combat aircraft the United States ever built. It was designed in the early 1950s for one job: dash in fast and low and deliver a nuclear bomb from an internal weapons bay. Crews called it the 'Thud.'

In Vietnam it was used instead for conventional bombing, and it flew the majority of Air Force strike missions against North Vietnam during Operation Rolling Thunder from 1965 to 1968. It could haul a heavier bomb load than a World War II B-17 and then run away at more than 700 miles per hour at low altitude.

It was also badly exposed. Flying predictable routes into what was then the most heavily defended airspace in the world, F-105 units took punishing losses to anti-aircraft fire and SA-2 surface-to-air missiles. Of 833 built, roughly 380 were lost in Southeast Asia, close to half the fleet.

The two-seat F-105G 'Wild Weasel,' which hunted missile radars, stayed in service after the single-seat strike aircraft were withdrawn, and the last Thunderchiefs flew with the Air National Guard until 1984. The type is also credited with 27.5 MiG kills, most of them scored with its internal 20-millimeter rotary cannon.

The F-111 introduced two features that became standard on later strike aircraft: a 'swing wing' that swept back for high-speed dashes and forward for efficient cruise and slow landings, and a terrain-following radar that flew the aircraft automatically at a few hundred feet in darkness or bad weather.

It came out of the contentious 1960s TFX program, an attempt to build one airframe for both the Air Force and the Navy. The Navy version was overweight and cancelled. The Air Force version was rushed into Vietnam in 1968, lost three of the first six aircraft deployed to unexplained causes, and was pulled back before returning with far better results in 1972.

At its best the F-111 could do what nothing else of its era could: strike a defended target at night, in any weather, at very low altitude and high speed, with no tanker and no escort. It flew the long-range 1986 strike on Libya round trip from bases in England.

About 563 were built in strike, electronic-warfare (EF-111 Raven), and strategic-bomber (FB-111) versions. The Air Force retired it between 1996 and 1998, and Australia kept its F-111s flying until 2010.

The F-15 was the Air Force's answer to reports of a formidable new Soviet fighter and to Vietnam's lesson that speed alone did not win air combat. It was designed uncompromisingly for air superiority, summed up in the program slogan 'not a pound for air-to-ground.'

With two big engines producing more thrust than the aircraft's loaded weight, the Eagle can accelerate while pointed straight up. Its large radar and long-range missiles let it detect and engage targets well beyond visual range.

Across the U.S., Israeli, and Saudi air forces, the F-15 is credited with more than 100 air-to-air victories and no confirmed losses to enemy aircraft, one of the strongest combat records of any modern fighter.

A ground-attack version, the F-15E Strike Eagle, entered service in 1989, and Boeing continues to build a heavily updated model, the F-15EX, for the Air Force in the 2020s, extending the design's production run past 50 years.

The F-16 came out of the 1970s 'Lightweight Fighter' program, an effort to build a small, agile, affordable fighter as a counterweight to the large and costly F-15. It first flew in 1974, reportedly after an unplanned lift-off during a high-speed taxi test.

It introduced several features new to a production fighter: a fully electronic 'fly-by-wire' control system with no mechanical linkage to the surfaces, a control stick mounted on the right console rather than between the pilot's knees, a seat reclined 30 degrees to help resist g-forces, and a frameless bubble canopy for unobstructed vision.

The design was deliberately made slightly aerodynamically unstable for agility, relying on the flight computer to keep it controllable, a trade that later became standard practice.

More than 4,600 have been built and flown by around 25 air forces, making the F-16 the most widely used Western jet fighter of the past half century and the multirole workhorse of the U.S. Air Force.

The A-10 was designed around a gun. The GAU-8/A Avenger, a seven-barrel 30-millimeter cannon roughly the length and weight of a small car, is mounted along the aircraft's centerline, and the airframe was built to carry it.

It is optimized to support troops in contact with the enemy: it flies low and slow, carries a heavy and varied weapons load on 11 hardpoints, and can loiter over a battlefield far longer than a fast jet. The pilot sits in a titanium 'bathtub' able to stop many ground-fire hits, and the flight controls have manual backups.

It proved its worth destroying Iraqi armor in the 1991 Gulf War and providing overwatch for ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Aircraft have returned to base with engines destroyed, hydraulics gone, and large holes in the wings and tail.

The Air Force has repeatedly proposed retiring the A-10 to fund newer aircraft, and Congress has repeatedly intervened to keep it flying. A phased retirement is now underway, with the fleet planned to be gone by the late 2020s.

The F-117 was the first operational aircraft designed from the outset to be nearly invisible to radar. Its faceted shape, a mosaic of flat panels, scatters radar energy in directions away from the transmitter, a technique made calculable by equations published by a Soviet physicist and applied by Lockheed's Skunk Works.

It was developed and operated in deep secrecy from a remote airfield in Nevada, flown only at night for years. The Air Force did not confirm its existence until 1988. Despite the 'F' for fighter designation, it carries no air-to-air weapons; it is a precision bomber.

Its combat debut came in the 1989 invasion of Panama, and it drew wide attention in the 1991 Gulf War, when F-117s struck heavily defended targets in central Baghdad that other aircraft could not reach.

One was shot down near Belgrade on March 27, 1999, when Serbian forces exploited predictable routing and long radar wavelengths, the only combat loss of the type. It was officially retired in 2008, though a number are kept flying quietly as test and training adversaries.

The B-2 is a flying wing: no fuselage, no tail, just a single blended lifting surface with a sawtooth trailing edge. The layout, which Northrop had explored with experimental bombers in the 1940s, minimizes the aircraft's radar and infrared signatures from every angle.

It was a Cold War program that outlived its original purpose. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Congress cut the planned fleet from 132 aircraft to 21. Spreading development costs across so few airframes drove the per-aircraft figure to roughly $2 billion.

The B-2 can carry both conventional precision weapons and nuclear bombs, and its signature mission is the very long-range strike: 30-plus-hour sorties flown from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to targets in Europe, the Middle East, or the Pacific and back, with aerial refueling.

It first saw combat over Kosovo in 1999 and has since struck targets in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, and in June 2025 B-2s bombed Iran's Fordow and Natanz nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer. It is being replaced by the B-21 Raider beginning in the late 2020s.

The F-14 Tomcat was the U.S. Navy's answer to the problem of defending an aircraft carrier against Soviet bombers carrying long-range anti-ship missiles. It paired a variable-sweep wing with the powerful AWG-9 radar and the AIM-54 Phoenix missile, which could track and strike targets more than 100 miles away.

The swing wing let a large, long-range interceptor still approach a pitching carrier deck slowly enough to land safely. A crew of two, a pilot and a radar intercept officer, shared the work of finding and engaging targets at extreme range.

Its public image came from the 1986 film 'Top Gun,' but its early service was dogged by unreliable engines that were not properly fixed until the F-14B and F-14D of the late 1980s and 1990s. In its final years it gained a precision ground-attack role, earning the nickname 'Bombcat.'

The Navy retired the Tomcat in 2006 in favor of the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. The only F-14s still flying belong to Iran, which bought 79 before the 1979 revolution and has kept some airworthy ever since with improvised parts.

The F/A-18 Hornet was built to do two jobs the Navy had previously split between separate aircraft: air-to-air fighting and air-to-ground attack. The designation itself, 'F' for fighter and 'A' for attack, states the point. It replaced the A-7 Corsair II and, over time, much of the F-14 and A-6 fleet.

It grew out of the losing entry in the same 1970s Lightweight Fighter contest that produced the F-16. Northrop's YF-17 was redesigned by McDonnell Douglas into a larger, twin-engine aircraft strong enough for catapult launches and arrested landings.

The much larger F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, in service since 2001, is effectively a new aircraft: about 25 percent bigger, with more range, more payload, and more internal room for future electronics. A dedicated electronic-attack version, the EA-18G Growler, replaced the EA-6B Prowler.

Between the original Hornet, the Super Hornet, and the Growler, the F/A-18 family is the backbone of the U.S. Navy carrier air wing and serves with several allied air forces, including Australia, Canada, Finland, and Switzerland.

The B-1 has one of the strangest procurement histories of any American aircraft. The original B-1A, a Mach 2 bomber meant to replace the B-52, was cancelled by President Carter in 1977 in favor of cruise missiles and the still-secret stealth bomber program.

President Reagan revived it in 1981 as the B-1B: slower, at about Mach 1.2, but with a reduced radar signature, more fuel, and more payload. It was meant as an interim bomber to bridge the gap until the B-2 arrived. One hundred were built by 1988.

It carries the largest bomb load, internal and external, of any U.S. bomber. After the Cold War it was converted entirely to conventional bombing and became a mainstay of sustained air campaigns over Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, where its speed and capacity let a handful of aircraft cover a wide area.

The B-1B has also been costly and difficult to maintain, and decades of heavy use have strained and shrunk the fleet. It is scheduled to retire as the B-21 Raider enters service, which would leave the much older B-52 still flying after it.

The F-22 was the first fighter to bring together the four qualities now used to define a 'fifth generation' aircraft: low-observable stealth from all angles, the ability to cruise above the speed of sound without using fuel-hungry afterburner ('supercruise'), thrust-vectoring engine nozzles for extreme agility, and the fusion of radar, electronic, and off-board data into a single tactical picture.

It was conceived in the 1980s to defeat projected Soviet fighters and modern air defenses. In exercises it has repeatedly produced simulated kill ratios so lopsided against fourth-generation fighters that they are often quoted in triple digits.

By law the F-22 cannot be exported, even to close allies. That, plus its cost, led Congress to end production in 2011 at 187 operational aircraft, roughly a quarter of the Air Force's original goal.

The small fleet is a lasting limitation. There are too few Raptors to sustain a presence everywhere they might be needed, and attrition from accidents cannot be replaced. A successor, the Boeing F-47, was selected in March 2025 under the Next Generation Air Dominance program.

The F-35 is built in three versions from one basic design: the F-35A takes off and lands conventionally for the Air Force, the F-35B can take off in a short distance and land vertically for the Marine Corps and several allied navies, and the F-35C has larger wings and a tailhook for U.S. Navy carriers.

Its defining feature is not speed or agility but information. Sensors around the airframe, plus data shared from other aircraft, ships, and satellites, are combined into one picture, and the pilot's helmet, which costs around $400,000, displays imagery that effectively lets them see through the aircraft.

It is the most expensive weapons program in history. U.S. government auditors estimate the lifetime cost, development, buying roughly 2,470 aircraft, and about 66 years of operations and sustainment, at more than $1.7 trillion (GAO, 2023).

After a troubled development marked by delays, software problems, and cost growth, the F-35 has become the standard fighter of the U.S. and allied air forces, with more than 1,100 delivered to the United States and about 20 partner nations.

The Predator entered service in 1995 as an unarmed surveillance drone over the Balkans. After Hellfire missiles were integrated and tested, an armed Predator carried out its first strike in Afghanistan in October 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, opening the era of routine drone warfare.

The MQ-9 Reaper, fielded from 2007, is far more capable: a turboprop-powered 'hunter-killer' that carries roughly 3,000 pounds of laser-guided bombs and missiles and can watch or strike a target for around a day without landing.

Crews operate them over combat zones from bases inside the United States, chiefly Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, via satellite link. The model raised debate over the legality and ethics of remote strikes, the risk to civilians, and the strain on operators who watch and act on targets for hours at a time.

By the 2010s the Air Force was flying more combat air patrols with remotely piloted aircraft than with any crewed type and training more drone operators than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

The RQ-4 Global Hawk is a large uncrewed reconnaissance aircraft with a wingspan comparable to an airliner's, able to fly for more than 30 hours at around 60,000 feet and survey tens of thousands of square miles of terrain in a single mission.

It flies its route autonomously from takeoff to landing; operators task its sensors and monitor systems rather than 'flying' it with a stick. It carries radar, electro-optical, and infrared sensors and signals-intelligence packages depending on the version.

The Global Hawk was intended to take over much of the strategic reconnaissance mission from the crewed U-2, but cost growth and the U-2's superior sensors led to years of debate in Congress over which to keep. The Navy operates a maritime version, the MQ-4C Triton.

A Global Hawk was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile over the Strait of Hormuz in June 2019, a loss with no crew that nonetheless brought the two countries close to a shooting exchange.

The B-21 Raider is a flying-wing stealth bomber, visually a smaller and more refined descendant of the B-2, developed by Northrop Grumman. It was publicly unveiled in December 2022 and first flew in November 2023.

The Air Force calls it a 'digital bomber': it was designed and extensively tested in software before parts were built, and its systems use an open architecture intended to let new weapons, sensors, and software be added over its life without redesigning the aircraft.

It is meant to be affordable in a way the B-2 was not. The target unit cost was set at roughly $700 million in 2022 dollars, and the Air Force intends to buy at least 100, enough to replace both the B-1 and the B-2.

The first aircraft are being tested at Edwards Air Force Base, and Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota is planned as the first operational base. It is expected to enter service in the second half of the 2020s.