Fighter jet (1954): Century Series / MiG-19/21 · 416

The fighter jet is a training-and-industry system that happens to have wings -- told as history. Me 262 and Meteor as footnotes to 1945; MiG-15 vs F-86 as the first mass jet fight. Soviet pilots in Korea are part of the record. Sabre aces and MiG Alley maps are memory; the Yalu was a political border as much as a flight line.

Century Series, MiG-21, and Vietnam's painful US relearning of guns and training (Topgun as a school, historically named). Export MiG-21s became a Third World silhouette. ROK F-4/F-16 purchases are alliance-industrial facts. Stealth types and the KF-X/KF-21 Korean project as an industrial-national story. Drones recast some missions -- see the drone page. No current tactics here.

After 1991 stays dated: 1965-73 (Vietnam air war) in From Me 262 skies to MiG Alley to later air forces. James Jabara (US ace (Korea)) is a named witness -- The first US jet ace in popular telling -- a MiG Alley name. Cost band: not a war -- aircrew and civilian deaths sit on the war pages that used the type. Encyclopedia, not a method.