F-16 Fighting Falcon

The F-16 Fighting Falcon is a single-engine, supersonic, multirole fourth-generation fighter originally developed by General Dynamics and produced by Lockheed Martin since the division was acquired in 1993. Entering service with the US Air Force in 1978 as a lightweight day fighter, it grew into a general-purpose aircraft that has been built in over 4,600 airframes across more than two dozen operators. The current production variant is the Block 70/72, assembled at Lockheed Martin’s Greenville, South Carolina plant.

At the heart of the Block 70/72 is the Northrop Grumman AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar — an active electronically scanned array that replaces the mechanically scanned APG-66/68 of earlier blocks. It drives a new mission computer, a center pedestal display borrowed from the F-35 cockpit, a helmet-mounted cueing system, and an automatic ground collision avoidance system that has been credited with saving several aircraft and pilots since being retrofitted to legacy fleets. The aircraft retains the Pratt & Whitney F100 or General Electric F110 turbofan of earlier blocks, giving it a top speed above Mach 2 and a combat radius Lockheed Martin cites at roughly 295 nautical miles on internal fuel.

Operators of the current and legacy types include the United States, Israel, Türkiye, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Poland, Romania, and — since 2024 — Ukraine, which received its first jets from a European coalition led by the Netherlands and Denmark. Ukrainian F-16s have been reported engaging Russian cruise missiles and one-way attack drones, though independent counts of sorties and losses remain partial. Israel’s air force has operated the type in combat continuously since the 1981 Osirak strike; Turkish F-16s have seen sustained use over Syria and northern Iraq.

Among its variants, one is directly relevant to the autonomous-aircraft field: the X-62A VISTA, a modified NF-16D operated by the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards. VISTA has flown DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution agents through live within-visual-range engagements against a human pilot, and in September 2023 carried the Secretary of the Air Force on a flight with the AI at the controls. The service has since used it as the open testbed for the broader effort to field AI-driven combat aircraft, including the Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme Lockheed Martin itself is now bidding into with its Vectis design.

The baseline fighter the X-62A is built on remains the yardstick those autonomy programmes are measured against — a four-decade reminder that mass, cost and sortie generation still shape what any new system has to beat.