5 Of The Best-Looking Fighter Jets In Military History

Aviation has been a critical element in warfare since World War I, which broke out just as airplanes were arriving as mainstream technology. In the years since then, military airplanes have evolved from open-cockpit rattletraps to multi-million dollar high-tech machines with advanced weapons, navigation, and detection avoidance systems. Fighter jets first took to the skies during World War II, and planes from that era include the pioneering Messerschmitt ME-262 and the Lockheed F-80.

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While the emphasis in fighter jet development has been primarily to make them agile in the air and effective battle machines, there’s no denying the visual appeal of a sleek jet that is built to go faster than the speed of sound and look tough at the same time. We’ve taken some time to go through the pages of military aviation history in an effort to single out what we felt were the best-looking fighter jets ever. Although we selected the following five aircraft solely based on their outward appearance, we discovered that many of them brought to the skies some important technological innovations to go along with their striking good looks.

The United States Navy has been operating F-14 Tomcat fighter jets in combat since the 1980s, and these planes have seen action all around the world. Grumman began developing the F-14 in the early 1970s after the General Dynamics F111-B was found to be too heavy to use on aircraft carriers. The F-14 took its first flight at the end of 1970, and the Navy took delivery of its first one a year and a half later. It didn’t see combat until 1981 but remained on active duty for the United States for a quarter century, with the last one being retired in 2006. The F-14 Tomcat looks like a not-so-distant cousin of the fighters used by the Rebel Alliance in the “Star Wars” films and starred in a two-film franchise that debuted about a decade after “A New Hope.”

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The F-14 was featured prominently in the 1986 blockbuster action film “Top Gun” and in a smaller role in the 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.” Paramount paid about $8,000 an hour (equivalent to more than $23,000 today) to keep the fighters in the sky for the original film, but by the time the sequel was in production, all of the U.S.-based F-14s had been grounded. There were still some in service in Iran, but filmmakers couldn’t secure access to them. One without an engine was used for a scene that takes place in a hangar, and computer graphics were used to generate F-14s for flight sequences.

[Featured image by U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public Domain]

“Top Gun” star Tom Cruise is a noted gearhead with an impressive personal car collection and a habit of riding motorcycles in his films. Cruise has also been a licensed pilot since 1994 and has a vintage fighter in his private aircraft fleet. It’s a P-51 Mustang that was built in 1946 and acquired by the actor in 2001. He flew the plane in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and Paramount released a featurette where some of his co-stars and members of the film’s production team talk about the plane.

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Monica Barbaro, who played Phoenix, observed that “even the Top Gun pilots kind of geek out over his P-51, which is saying something.”  Charles Parnell, who played Warlock, called it “a cool-looking plane.” Technical Advisor Steve Hinton pointed out that the P-51 Mustang’s controls and instruments were all mechanical and analog, unlike the electronic systems on modern planes. “There’s still a lot of that pioneering spirit of aviation when you’re flying a P-51,” he noted.

The Mustang took its first flight in 1940 and went into service with Britain’s Royal Air Force less than two years later. Most of the almost P-51s made had two .50-caliber machine guns on the nose and four .30-caliber guns on the wings, although some had .20-caliber armaments in place of the .30s, and the United States Air Force flew the A-36A dive bomber variant. Of the 1,500 or so that were made for the war effort, only about 150 — or one percent – have survived to this day.

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The Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) was in full swing when the Soviets began working on the MiG-29 in the late 1960s. The country needed a replacement for the MiG 21, which had been in service since the beginning of the decade. The MiG acronym is a combination of the beginning letters of Mikoyan and Gurevich — the two manufacturers — joined with an i, which means “and” in Russian. A prototype took to the air in 1977, and the production version followed five years later. The MiG-29 looks like a combination of a Space Shuttle and a Bonneville Salt Flats speed machine, with large twin afterburners and massive vertical fins that give it stability and an imposing profile.

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The U.S.S.R built an export version for more than two dozen of its allies, but the fighters it sent abroad weren’t capable of carrying out nuclear attacks. When the country split into its individual states at the end of 1991, 34 nuclear-capable MiG-29s became the property of the Republic of Moldova. The United States bought 21 of them in 1997, presumably to keep them out of the hands of rogue nations. Many were dismantled after a good going-over, but a few are on display in various spots around the country. The Pima Air and Space Museum in Tuscon, Arizona, has one on loan from the U.S. Air Force, and another sits outdoors at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio.

To portray the enemy’s MiG 28s in “Top Gun,” producers secured some Northrop F-5 fighters and painted them black. While they are similar enough in appearance to allow this bit of movie magic, we chose the F-5 over the MiG for this list mostly for patriotic reasons. It’s also been more widely distributed around the world than its Soviet lookalike, meaning you have a better opportunity to catch an F-5 at an airshow near you.

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The F-5 looks like something Evel Knievel would have used to jump school buses or a gorge in the 1970s but took its first flight in the Summer of 1963. The streamlined construction and 7:1 thrust-to-weight ratio provided by the General Electric J85-13 engines make the F-5 slick and fast. It looks like it’s almost ready for space travel and can go 1.4 times the speed of sound and climb to 50,000 feet. That’s almost nine and a half miles and puts the F-5 in the lower reaches of the stratosphere. It was in service for most of the Cold War, from 1964 through 1989.

The Curtis P-40 was used to respond to the attack on Pearl Harbor and saw service in World War II across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Different versions were known as the Warhawk, Tomahawk, and Kittyhawk, and some were painted with shark’s-mouth graphics by the Third Squadron’s American Volunteer Group, a group of pilots organized by Claire Chennault to fight the Japanese. The AVG were also known as the “Flying Tigers,” and used P-40s to take out more than 350 Japanese aircraft in a little over six months. The plane’s form was intimidating even without the large white shark’s teeth just behind the propeller, and the imposing but slightly cartoonish adornment made it look angry even while on the tarmac.

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John Belushi’s character Wild Bill Kelso landed one on a country road in the film “1941.” British Warhawks also appeared in the 2008 historical drama “Valkyrie,” which starred Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who took part in an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler.