McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle
US fighter aircraft
The McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle is an American twin-engine, all-weather fighter aircraft designed by McDonnell Douglas (now part of Boeing). Following reviews of proposals, the United States Air Force (USAF) selected McDonnell Douglas's design in 1969 to meet the service's need for a dedicated air superiority fighter. The Eagle took its maiden flight in July 1972, and entered service in 1976. It is among the most successful modern fighters, with over 104 victories and no losses in air-to-air combat.
The Eagle has been exported to several countries, including Israel, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. Although the F-15 was originally envisioned as a pure air superiority fighter, its design included a secondary ground-attack capability that was largely unused. It proved flexible enough that an improved all-weather strike derivative, the F-15E Strike Eagle, was later developed. That fighter entered service in 1989 and has been exported to several nations. Several additional Eagle and Strike Eagle subvariants have been produced for foreign customers, with production of enhanced variants ongoing.
The F-15 was the principal air superiority fighter of the USAF and several U.S. allies during the late Cold War, replacing the F-4 Phantom II. The Eagle was first used in combat by the Israeli Air Force in 1979 and saw extensive action in the 1982 Lebanon War.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29251. The Library of Congress control number is sh85040370. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1972, 1976 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.