It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer.

The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that "best" is four or five different questions wearing one coat. Best at killing other fighters? Best at surviving modern air defences? Best at being available on a Tuesday morning when you actually need it? Best per dollar? Best at 40,000 feet, or best at 3,000 feet in a turning fight with the fuel light on?

Those questions have different winners. Some of them have uncomfortable winners. So instead of crowning one aeroplane, we are going to run the contest properly — category by category, with the numbers, and with what the people who actually fly these things say about them.

1. Best combat record: the F-15 Eagle

If "best" means "has actually done it, repeatedly, against real opponents," the argument is over quickly. The McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle has somewhere between 90 and 106 air-to-air kills and has never been shot down by another aircraft.

You will usually see this written as "104 to zero." We publish it as a range in our fighter jet combat statistics database, and the range matters. Different air forces count differently, some claims are contested, and a handful of the Israeli tallies are disputed by the other side. What is not disputed is the zero. No F-15 has been lost in air-to-air combat in more than fifty years of service, across four air forces.

That is a genuinely extraordinary number, and it deserves one piece of context: the Eagle mostly fought at times and places of its side’s choosing, with AWACS support, against opponents who were often outnumbered, less well trained and flying with worse missiles. The aircraft is superb. The circumstances helped.

Ask an Eagle pilot and you get a more sober assessment than the internet gives you.

She is equally blunt about the trade-off built into the airframe: “Size. Big means more gas and more missiles. But being large means you can be easily seen and much more easily countered in a visual fight.”

For the counter-example, look at the other end of our database. The MiG-29 Fulcrum — an aircraft NATO spent the 1980s being genuinely frightened of — has no confirmed air-to-air kills and around fifteen air-to-air losses. Same era, comparable aerodynamics, catastrophically different record. Almost none of that gap is about the airframe.

2. Hardest to fight: the F-22 Raptor

El F-22 Raptor has never scored an air-to-air kill. It has never needed to. Its reputation rests almost entirely on what happens to people who train against it, and those people are unusually candid about the experience.

His aggressor squadron commander, Lt. Col. Larry Bruce, put it more formally in the same piece: “It’s humbling not only because of the F-22’s stealth, but also because of its unmatched maneuverability and power.” Worth noting that Code One is Lockheed Martin’s own magazine — though the quotes are from foreign and aggressor pilots, not salesmen.

The Raptor’s weakness is not performance. It is arithmetic. Only 187 were built, production ended after five years, and it cannot be exported. The best air-superiority fighter in the world is also one of the rarest.

3. Best situational awareness: the F-35

No aircraft in modern history has been argued about like the F-35 Lightning II, and most of the argument is about the wrong thing.

In 2015 a test-pilot report leaked describing an F-35A at a distinct energy disadvantage against an F-16D in high angle-of-attack manoeuvring. It became "the F-35 can’t dogfight." Two things are true at once here. The report was real, and its core finding on raw manoeuvrability was not actually contradicted by the official rebuttal. But the aircraft was AF-2, an early flight-sciences airframe without the mission systems, weapons or helmet that make a production F-35 what it is, and the exercise was a handling-qualities evaluation rather than a representative fight.

The most useful voices are pilots who flew something else first.

Hanche is not a cheerleader. In the same post he is candid that the F-35’s cockpit view is worse than the F-16’s, because the headrest blocks the over-the-shoulder check that the Viper allowed. He simply argues the trade is worth it.

Lt. Col. David “Chip” Berke — the only US Marine to have flown both the F-22 and the F-35, and a former TOPGUN instructor — frames it as a category error.

His summary of the aircraft, from 2012, has aged well: “that’s the F-35 in a nutshell; it is a situational awareness machine.” And, pointedly, that the F-22 has “a 4th generation cockpit on top of a 5th generation sensor and information system.”

One footnote the sceptics rarely mention: the F-35 already has a confirmed air-to-air kill on its record. The F-22 does not.

4. Best in a knife fight: Typhoon and Rafale

Get inside a few miles, guns and short-range missiles only, and the picture changes completely. This is the one arena where Europe’s two 4.5-generation fighters are genuinely, demonstrably world-class.

At Red Flag–Alaska in 2012, German Eurofighter Typhoon flew one-versus-one against F-22s. The Germans stripped the tanks off and went hunting.

His wing commander was careful to keep it in proportion, which is exactly why the quote is credible.

El Rafale camp does not concede the point. Peter Collins, a former RAF Harrier and Sea Harrier pilot who flew the type as a Flight International test pilot, went further than any test pilot normally does.

He later added, in a 2015 interview, the line that still starts arguments in two countries: “I think the Rafale would eat Typhoon below 10,000ft.”

French Navy Rafale pilot Pierre-Henri “Até” Chuet is blunter still, and we quote him mostly to show how much of this is tribal: he calls the Typhoon “a joke, very easy to shoot” and claims repeated high-altitude kills against them. Set against Gruene and Pfeiffer, it is a useful reminder that pilots are partisan, exercises are artificial, and everybody remembers the sorties they won.

Interestingly, Chuet is far more cautious about the F-22 — dismissive of it in a guns-only fight, considerably less so once it has a helmet sight and an AIM-9X.

5. Fastest: the MiG-25, with a very large asterisk

You will read everywhere that the MiG-25 Foxbat is the fastest fighter ever fielded, at Mach 3.2. That is true in the way that "this car does 200 mph" is true if the engine is scrap afterwards.

The Foxbat’s operational limit was around Mach 2.83. The famous Mach 3.2 dashes over Israel came at the cost of engines that had to be replaced. It was an interceptor built out of steel to chase an American bomber that was cancelled, and its speed was never manoeuvre speed — at those numbers it was going roughly in a straight line.

Its successor, the MiG-31 Foxhound, is slower on paper and vastly more useful. And there is a broader point: modern fighters are slower than 1960s interceptors on purpose. Speed costs weight, fuel, manoeuvrability and stealth, and the threat it was designed to counter no longer exists in the same form.

If raw numbers are your thing, we go through the whole field in Los 10 aviones más rápidos del mundo.

6. Best value: the Gripen

Here is the category almost nobody runs, and the one air forces actually agonise over. A fighter that is unbeatable and unavailable loses to a fighter that is merely good and airborne.

El Saab JAS 39 Gripen was designed around that idea from the start: dispersed operation from public roads, rearmed and refuelled by a small conscript ground crew, back in the air fast.

He works for Saab, so weigh it accordingly. But operational Swedish pilots make the same strategic argument from a different angle.

Grev is refreshingly willing to name the aircraft’s faults too, relaying a colleague’s verdict that “Gripen has probably the world’s worst probe placement but compensates that with the world’s best flight control system.”

7. The Eastern contenders

El Su-27 Flanker family remains one of the great aerodynamic achievements in aviation, and the Su-35 is the most capable version flying. Its combat record is thin but not empty — seven claimed kills for one loss in our database, with the asterisks that go with contested claims.

The honest verdict on the Flanker comes from an American who spent his career preparing to fight it.

And on the MiG-29, the man best placed to judge it is Lt. Col. Fred “Spanky” Clifton, the first USAF exchange pilot to fly the Fulcrum with the Luftwaffe.

Though within ten miles, with an R-73 and a helmet sight, the Fulcrum genuinely was frightening — the Luftwaffe’s own squadron commander reckoned it close to unbeatable in that envelope. Two things can be true.

China’s J-20 and Russia’s Su-57 are the great unknowns. Neither has an air-to-air record. Any confident ranking of them is guesswork wearing a lab coat.

8. The factor that beats all of the above

Every pilot we quoted for this article, unprompted, said some version of the same thing. The machine matters less than the person in it and the system behind them.

That is the single most useful sentence in this whole article, and it comes from someone with two thousand hours in the aircraft with the best record in history.

So what is the best fighter jet in the world?

Our answer, category by category:

Best overall combat aircraft in service today: the F-35, on the unglamorous grounds that it sees first, shoots first, and shares what it sees with everyone else. It is not the best turner, the fastest, or the cheapest. It does not need to be.

Best pure air-superiority fighter: the F-22, and it is not close — but there are only 187 of them and you cannot buy one.

Best record: the F-15, unbeaten in fifty years.

Best aircraft to actually own: the Gripen, if you are a country with a real budget and a real border.

Best in a turning fight: Typhoon high, Rafale low, and anyone who tells you the margin is large is selling something.

If you want to compare the hard numbers yourself — kills, losses, ratios and which claims are contested — they are all in our fighter jet combat statistics database, and every aircraft above has a full entry in the MiGFlug Aircraft Encyclopedia.

And there is one more answer, which is not a dodge. Every aircraft in this article is one you can read about and none you can fly. The best fighter jet, for almost everyone reading this, is the one that will actually take you up: a L-39 Albatros, a Cazador de halcones, a MiG-29 to the edge of space. The specification sheet stops mattering somewhere around the first roll.

Sources: MiGFlug fighter jet combat statistics database; Code One, 2007; Air Force Print News, 2005; Combat Aircraft, 2012; Wired, 2012; War Is Boring and the F-35 Joint Program Office, 2015; Norwegian Ministry of Defence, 2016; Second Line of Defense, 2012; Flight International, 2009; Hush-Kit interviews, 2019-2020; Foxtrot Alpha, 2015.