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More than 50 years after making its first flight, the F-15 Eagle remains one of the most capable fighter aircraft ever developed.

The F-15 was born from the difficult lessons learned during the Vietnam War. In the late 1950s, Air Force planners were confident that the advent of powerful new radars and long-range air-to-air missiles had rendered close-range aerial combat a thing of the past. So fighter jets like venerable the Mcdonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom were not engineered to be light or agile like their predecessors. Instead, they were designed to be heavily-loaded with missiles and carry powerful radars. Their pilots were no longer trained to dogfight, as they would engage the enemy at great distances, well beyond visual range.

But in the Vietnam War, military planners learned the hard way that the age of dogfighting was far from over. American pilots were being downed at alarming rates. The Friend or Foe (IFF) systems designed to identify enemy targets proved unreliable, forcing Air Force pilots to get in close to visually identify targets. At close-range, up against more agile Soviet-built MiGs, the F-4s were at a disadvantage. They were less agile than the MiGs, lacked a gun for close-range combat, and their pilots weren’t properly trained. To make matters worse, 1967, the Soviet Union looked set to unveil what appeared to be a new super-fighter built for extreme maneuverability.

The devastating experience from Vietnam and concerns being outclassed in the skies pushed the United States to develop a new air-superiority fighter that could face off with any current or future Soviet-built fighter. The result would be a twin-engine, high-performance, all-weather air superiority fighter known for its incredible acceleration and agility. Engineered from the ground up for tactical dominance in any air space, the F-15 holds the distinction of over a hundred aerial victories without a single defeat.

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