A new jet wearing an old jet’s name

What makes the Super Hornet special

Full specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe the single-seat F/A-18E at Block II standard — the version the United States Navy has flown in bulk for two decades and the one with published NATOPS and Standard Aircraft Characteristics data behind it. Deltas for the two-seat Ф, for Block III and for the EA-18G Growler in grey. The legacy F/A-18A/B/C/D Hornet is a different and smaller aeroplane and has its own page; nothing here describes it.

Armament & payload

The Super Hornet carries the widest weapons set in United States naval aviation, and one of its stores is a surface-to-air missile

Eleven stations, 17,750 lb of external load and a clearance list that runs from a 20 mm gun to a stand-off anti-ship missile: the Super Hornet inherited every job the Navy used to spread across the F-14, the A-6, the S-3 and the KA-6D, and the weapons list is what that consolidation looks like. The genuinely new entry is the AIM-174B Gunslinger, an air-launched SM-6 — a ship’s surface-to-air missile with the booster removed, hung under a fighter’s wing. It is 16.5 ft long and weighs 1,830 lb, roughly five times an AMRAAM, and it gives the Navy its first very-long-range air-to-air weapon since the AIM-54 Phoenix went in 2004. The other thing worth knowing about this aircraft’s payload is less glamorous: a large share of Super Hornet flying is spent carrying fuel for other Super Hornets. Clearances differ by block and by operator: Block III aircraft carry weapons and networking that Block I aircraft never will, the Growler gives up its gun entirely, and Australian and Kuwaiti fleets fly a narrower subset than the United States Navy.

Sourcing caveat: weapon fits follow the United States Navy fact file, the F/A-18E/F NATOPS manuals and Standard Aircraft Characteristics documents in the public domain, Boeing and Raytheon statements and Naval Air Systems Command releases. AIM-174B data is unusually thin: the missile was a surprise when it appeared at RIMPAC in July 2024, its official nickname was not published until May 2025, and its true range has never been stated. The 240 km figure is the confirmed floor, not an estimate of what it can do. The proportion of Super Hornet sorties flown as tanking is quoted at between a fifth and a third depending on the source and the deployment; no single authoritative figure exists, so the range is given rather than a false precision.

Variants

An almost entirely new aeroplane kept an old designation so that Congress would buy it

The honest description of the F/A-18E/F is that it is a new aircraft wearing an old name. When the McDonnell Douglas A-12 Avenger II collapsed in 1991, taking the Navy’s A-6 replacement with it, and the navalised F-22 died alongside it, the service needed something that Congress would fund quickly and without a fight. McDonnell Douglas had the "Hornet 2000" study on the shelf. The Navy kept the F/A-18 designation deliberately, to sell the programme as a low-risk derivative — and the resulting aircraft shares its forward fuselage, some avionics, the ejection seat and the maintenance procedures with the legacy Hornet, and very little else. It is a quarter larger in wing area, 86 cm longer, and empty it weighs slightly more than an F-15C.

Two engineering stories from that development are worth keeping. The first is wing drop: an uncommanded roll in transonic manoeuvring that showed up in flight test and was fixed, after a long and unhappy investigation, with a dogtooth on the wing leading edge and a strip of porous skin at the wing fold to bleed the airflow. The second is the pylons. Early wind-tunnel work suggested released stores might strike the airframe, so every under-wing pylon was canted a few degrees outboard. It was later established that this had never been necessary — but the production tooling was already cut and re-clearing the flight envelope would have cost time and money, so the cant stayed. It costs the aeroplane transonic and supersonic drag to this day.

The third story is Block III, and it is a story about a promise quietly withdrawn. Block III was sold on conformal fuel tanks that would add 3,500 lb of fuel and roughly 480 km of combat range. In 2021 the Navy dropped them over cost, schedule and performance — among other things they hurt transonic acceleration through added wave drag. What Block III actually delivers is a sensors-and-networking aircraft: a new cockpit, a networked targeting processor, IRST21 and a 10,000-hour airframe. Those are real and useful. They are not the range increase the brochures implied.

F/A-18E (first flight 29 November 1995; fleet service 1999)

The single-seat baseline: eleven stations, F414 engines, caret intakes, 25 per cent more wing and 42 per cent fewer structural parts than the legacy Hornet.

F/A-18F (from 1999)

Two-seat version. Not a trainer — the back seat is a weapon systems officer’s, and the F is the fleet’s preferred aircraft for forward air control, long-range strike coordination and anything demanding two heads. Costs about a tonne of internal fuel.

Block I (1999–2005)

Original production standard, with the mechanically scanned AN/APG-73 radar carried over from the legacy Hornet to hold development cost down.

Block II (2005–April 2020; final aircraft delivered 23 April 2020)

AN/APG-79 AESA radar, larger displays, joint helmet-mounted cueing. The bulk of the fleet, and the standard most of the type’s combat record was flown at.

Block III (first delivered 2021; conversions running to about 2033)

Advanced Cockpit System with a single large-area touchscreen, Distributed Targeting Processor-Networked and the Tactical Targeting Network Technology datalink, open mission systems architecture, IRST21 and a 10,000-hour airframe. Conformal fuel tanks were cancelled in 2021 and are not part of it.

EA-18G Growler (first flight 15 August 2006; in service 22 September 2009; 172 built by October 2021)

Carrier electronic attack aircraft replacing the EA-6B Prowler. Gun deleted, wingtips given over to ALQ-218 receivers, up to five ALQ-99 jamming pods now giving way to the Next Generation Jammer. Nine stations remain for weapons. Three Growlers working together can geolocate an emitter in real time.

NEA-18G (2 aircraft)

Two F/A-18Fs converted as Growler prototypes.

Advanced Super Hornet (proposed, not adopted)

The 2013 demonstrator with conformal tanks, an enclosed low-observable weapons pod and further radar cross-section reduction. The Navy declined it; the cockpit and IRST elements were salvaged into Block III, and the conformal tanks and signature work remain of stated interest to Australia.

F/A-18F, Royal Australian Air Force (24, ordered 2007, in service from December 2010)

Bought to bridge the gap left by the F-111C’s retirement; twelve were wired from build so they could be converted to Growlers, though in the event Australia bought Growlers outright instead.

F/A-18E/F, Kuwait (28 — 22 E and 6 F)

The only other export sale, ordered in 2018 after long delays. Kuwait’s legacy F/A-18C/D fleet has been sold on to Malaysia.

Legacy Hornet, F/A-18A/B/C/D (cross-reference only)

A separate and smaller aircraft, descended from the Northrop YF-17, with its own page in this encyclopedia. It shares a name and a forward fuselage with the Super Hornet and should not be counted with it.

Closing caveat: variant boundaries here follow Naval Air Systems Command and Boeing usage. "Block" is a procurement label rather than a fixed configuration — individual aircraft within a block differ by retrofit, and Block II airframes passing through Service Life Modification emerge with Block III capability, so a photograph cannot reliably tell you which block you are looking at.

From “Hornet 2000” to the fleet’s backbone

Twelve Super Hornet stories

The Super Hornet in pictures

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The Super Hornet in motion

DroneScapes — one of the most-watched Super Hornet films on YouTube.

Where the Super Hornet flies

Operators today

Two air arms fly the Super Hornet, and one of them owns almost all of them

This is a very short list for an aircraft built in the hundreds, and the shortness is the point: the Super Hornet was designed around a catapult and an arrestor wire, and almost nobody else has those. The United States Navy holds the overwhelming majority. Australia is the only other operator with aircraft in front-line squadrons that can be corroborated from published order of battle. The bars separate the strike fighters from the Growlers because they are different aircraft doing different jobs, not two marks of the same one.

These are estimates of delivered, in-service aircraft, and the list is deliberately this short. The United States Navy figure covers roughly 416 F/A-18E/F in service in 2025 with a further 93 on order; those on order are excluded here. Australia took 24 F/A-18F from December 2010 and twelve EA-18G by July 2017 — it actually bought thirteen Growlers, because one was destroyed by an engine fire after an aborted take-off at Nellis Air Force Base on 29 January 2018, written off that August, and an attrition replacement was purchased. Kuwait ordered 28 aircraft, 22 F/A-18E and 6 F/A-18F, and Boeing has reported completing that delivery run, but no current operational squadron strength has been published and it is therefore listed here rather than charted. The United States Marine Corps declined the Super Hornet entirely and flies legacy Hornets and F-35s instead; no other country operates the type. Sources: United States Navy and Naval Air Systems Command releases, Royal Australian Air Force order of battle, IISS The Military Balance and FlightGlobal World Air Forces; entries that could not be corroborated are omitted.

The score that defines it

The Super Hornet is above all a strike aircraft, and most of its combat record is written in bombs dropped over Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and in fuel passed to other jets. But it also holds a rare distinction: the only air-to-air kill scored by any Hornet variant in US service this century.

The 2017 kill — an AIM-120 AMRAAM downing a Fitter that had bombed US-allied ground forces — was the first US air-to-air kill of a crewed aircraft since the 1999 Kosovo campaign. Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.

Everything people ask about the Super Hornet

Continue the tour

Every fact, checked

• Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)Official US Navy programme page for the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.
• Boeing — F/A-18 Super HornetManufacturer specifications, Block III details and production history.
• Airforce TechnologyAirframe, engine and avionics detail and export customer history.
• The War Zone (TWZ)First-hand account of the 18 June 2017 Su-22 shootdown from the pilots.
• Navy TimesThe inside story of Lt Cdr Tremel’s air-to-air kill and Distinguished Flying Cross.
• The Aviation Geek ClubDetailed comparison of the legacy Hornet and the Super Hornet.
• JanesKuwaiti Super Hornet order and delivery status.
• Simple FlyingOverview history of the US F/A-18E/F Super Hornet programme.