About 4,604 F-16s have been built since 1976 — more than any other Western fighter of its generation. It was manufactured in the United States and under licence in Europe and Asia, becoming the backbone of some 25 air forces. New-build Block 70/72 jets are still rolling off the Greenville, South Carolina line in 2026, half a century after the prototype first flew.

That scale is the whole story. A fighter cheap enough to build by the thousand and flexible enough to bomb, dogfight, hunt radars and stand nuclear alert could be sold to almost anyone — which is exactly why the F-16 spread across every inhabited continent and outlasted rivals that cost far more.

Conventional aircraft are built to be stable — nudge them and they return to level flight. That self-righting tendency also fights the pilot in a hard turn. The F-16’s designers threw it away: they moved the centre of gravity aft so the jet is naturally unstable and wants to pitch up, then handed control to a computer that constantly restrains it. The pilot no longer moves the surfaces directly; he tells the computer what he wants and it obeys. The pay-off is a turn rate no stable design can match — and every fly-by-wire fighter since has followed the F-16’s lead.

Sustained 9-g turns push blood out of the brain and grey a pilot out. The F-16 team fought that with ergonomics: a frameless bubble canopy for visibility, a seat reclined 30 degrees so the heart sits closer to the head, and a sidestick on the right console that senses force rather than travel — so a pilot pinned by g-forces can still fly precisely with tiny hand movements. Together they made the cockpit a genuine leap in both survivability and situational awareness.

Affordability was the whole point of the Lightweight Fighter program. Legacy F-16C/D airframes were commonly cited in the region of US $18–27 million — a fraction of the heavyweight interceptors of the day — which is precisely what let some 25 nations buy and sustain fleets of them. New-build Block 70/72 jets, with AESA radar and modern avionics, cost substantially more, but still undercut fifth-generation fighters by a wide margin. Exact per-flight-hour figures vary by operator and are not consistently published; treat any single number as an estimate.