F/A-18 Hornet

The F/A-18 Hornet is an American twin-engine, carrier-capable multirole fighter developed by McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing, entering United States Navy and Marine Corps service in 1983 as a single airframe able to serve interchangeably in the fighter and attack roles that earlier American naval aviation had split across separate aircraft types. Descended from a design that lost the Air Force's lightweight fighter competition to the F-16 but was reworked into a navalized carrier fighter, the Hornet combined reasonably good air-to-air performance with a strong ground-attack payload and the ruggedness needed for repeated carrier landings, and its extensive combat record spans the 1986 airstrikes on Libya through the Gulf War, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. An enlarged and substantially redesigned successor, the Super Hornet, entered service in 1999 and has gradually replaced earlier Hornet variants in American service, while the original design remains in front-line use with several allied air forces around the world.