Developed at the peak of the Cold War, the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle was designed to compete against a Soviet fighter American military officials believed was all but unbeatable. America’s Defense apparatus looked at the record-breaking speed and power of the emerging MiG-25 and let their imaginations run wild, but the aircraft they designed to defeat this nightmare of their own creation was somehow even wilder.

When the F-15 as we now know it emerged from development, it came with an unprecedented combination of power, maneuverability, and advanced avionics that left it without equal anywhere in the world. Its powerful pair of Pratt & Whitney F100 afterburning turbofan engines could propel the Eagle from the ground to 30,000 feet in less than 60 seconds, and up to 65,000 feet — high enough to boil the blood of its pilot — in just over two minutes. In fact, a modified F-15, dubbed the Streak Eagle, broke eight climbing world records before the F-15 even entered service, reaching nearly 100,000 feet — 15,000 feet above the SR-71’s stated service ceiling — in about three and a half minutes.

But the Eagle is much more than a rocket ship with wings.

Through a combination of its immense power output and low wing loading (or the ratio of aircraft weight to total wing area), the Eagle is so nimble that Boeing test pilots have gone on record to say that the latest F-15EX, equipped with new fly-by-wire controls, can perform aerobatic maneuvers that are usually reserved for jets with thrust vectoring engines, or engine nozzles that can move independent of the airframe, found in super-maneuverable fighters like the F-22 or Russia’s Su-35.

Thanks to a constantly improving avionics suite and the addition of increasingly capable air-to-air missiles, F-15s may have been designed for close-quarters battles, but have evolved in BVR champs. In 2021, the US Air Force announced an F-15C scored the longest-ever reported air-to-air kill against a BQM-167 target drone — at a distance that has yet to be disclosed, but is understood to be in the triple digits.

With an unmatched air combat record of 104 wins and zero losses, Eagles have been known to make it home after taking........

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