On the opening morning of Desert Storm, 17 January 1991, four VFA-81 “Sunliners” F/A-18Cs launched from USS Saratoga, each hauling four 2,000-lb Mk 84 bombs toward the H-3 airfield in western Iraq. An E-2C Hawkeye warned of MiG-21s closing head-on. Lt Cdr Mark Fox a Lt Nick Mongillo swung to the threat and killed both MiGs — Fox with an AIM-9 Sidewinder, Mongillo with an AIM-7 Sparrow — then rolled back onto their attack run and dropped their bombs on target.

The whole air-to-air engagement lasted under a minute. No aircraft type had ever so publicly demonstrated the “F/A” promise: win the dogfight a complete the strike on the same mission, without swapping jets or jettisoning ordnance. It became the enduring case study for why one multirole airframe could replace two specialists.

The strakes running forward of the wing roots are not decoration. At high angle of attack they shed powerful vortices that re-energise the airflow over the wing, keeping it attached when the nose is pointed high and older designs would stall and depart. That is why the Hornet stays crisply controllable in the slow, nose-high regime — a decisive advantage in a close-in knife-fight and, just as importantly, on the low-and-slow carrier approach where control authority is everything.

The YF-17 and YF-16 were rival lightweight fighters, but navalizing the YF-17 into the F/A-18 meant reinforcing almost everything: a heavier structure to survive catapult shots and arrested landings, catapult-capable nose gear, an arrestor hook and wings that fold to fit crowded decks. All of that added weight over a land-based fighter like the F-16. The payoff was an aircraft that could slam onto a pitching carrier deck day and night, over open ocean, on two engines — exactly what the Navy could not get from the lighter, single-engine design.

Published unit costs for the legacy Hornet range roughly from US$29 million to US$57 million depending on the variant, the year and how the accounting is done — flyaway cost, program cost, then-year versus constant dollars all give different answers. Treat any single figure as an approximation. No credible, consistent cost-per-flight-hour number exists in open sources for the legacy A/B/C/D either. What is clear is the value proposition the Navy bought: a single airframe that did the work of two, cutting the number of aircraft types a carrier air wing had to buy, crew, arm and maintain.