Fighter Tech Tree

The development lineage of real-world fighter aircraft, from the last piston fighters of the late 1930s to the 5th generation — who developed what from what, who built it, and what everyone else called it.

What this is

Every aircraft links to its Wikipedia and Grokipedia article. Solid arrows are direct development; dashed arrows are influence; dash-dot arrows are license production or copies — including unlicensed ones, like the IAI Nesher built from Mirage 5 plans, or the Shenyang J-11B carrying on the Su-27 without Sukhoi's blessing.

Where a family matters, its variants are their own chain — the F-15's single-seat A→C line, twin-seat B→D line, the E as a different animal, and exports beyond — and the Variants button collapses those chains back to family heads.

How to read it

Node color is origin: United States, USSR / Russia, Europe, rest of world. The chart is a timeline: horizontal position is the type's first flight, from the late interwar years to the 2020s, with the end of World War II (1945) marked as a dotted line where the jet age begins.

Scroll to zoom, drag to pan (on touch screens, pinch to zoom), hover an aircraft for a quick look, click it — its summary, manufacturer, operator designations, and article links open in an In Detail tab in this sidebar. Arrows are clickable too: each one explains what changed between the two aircraft it connects. Press Esc or close the tab to come back here.

Sources & honesty

Jane's All the World's Aircraft is the print gold standard for this material; it is not freely linkable, so article links go to Wikipedia and Grokipedia, and the write-ups were fact-checked against Wikipedia. We used an LLM (Claude) to write the aircraft summaries and the description text on every arrow. Lineage is genuinely contested in places — disputed or informal links carry a ? and say so. Aircraft photographs are loaded from Wikimedia Commons with per-image credit in the detail panel. Corrections welcome via GitHub issues.

Scope

Fighters and their fighter-derived kin from roughly 1935 onward — WWI and most interwar biplanes are out of scope, as are pure bombers and attack types except where a fighter lineage runs through them. Dates are first flights of the type or variant, which sometimes differ from service entry by years.

License

Site code is MIT · source on GitHub. Text content draws on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) for facts; photographs remain under their stated licenses with credit per image.