• Eren Yeager and the other Titan Shifters from Attack on Titan. You thought piloting a 15 meter tall giant wasn't possible? Think again! This show at its core is a Humongous Mecha Anime.
• The various versions of Area 88 feature many aces among the mercenary pilots, including protagonist Shin Kazama, his friend Mickey Simon, and base commander Saki Vashtal. There are others, but they tended to die shortly after being introduced.
• Code Geass has two main examples, Suzaku Kururugi for Britannia, and Kallen Stadtfeld/Kozuki for the Black Knights. Several others can be considered above average such as some of the Knights of the Round, and some of the Black Knights, but none of them hold a candle to the above two.
  • Kallen is a definite steamroller, which is required because her Guren MKII's most useful weapon is close-range, which means that she has to be aggressive in order to survive. Even when she gets long-range attacks, she sticks to this in most cases. Suzaku himself has noted that even with Lelouch's Geass command to "live" placed on him, he cannot beat Kallen, implying that she is arguably the best pilot in the Code Geass universe.
  • In an odd case of "Unstoppable Force meets Immovable Object", Suzaku uses the same strategy, even though his Lancelot is a well-rounded machine not nearly as suited to it as hers is. But Suzaku, being Suzaku, simply fails to capitalize on this in areas that his opponents lack... unless he's on a mission. This is particularly telling with any battle where he and Kallen clash, save when emotions get in the way.
  • While not exactly an exceptionally skilled pilot, Lelouch vi Britannia is a definite Sniper: while the Burai he used at the beginning is a mook with some cosmetic modifications, his later Knightmares — the Gawain and the Shinkiro — have brutal long-range firepower to make up for the lack of close-range fighting capability.
  • Oldrin Zevon from Oz the Reflection is an ace, but it is never clear which piloting style she prefers.
• The main characters of Cowboy Bebop all take turns acting as ace pilots with their own personal space fighters when their bounty has a spacecraft of their own or when air power is called for with Spike being the most skilled. In the movie, the Big Bad is preparing to release his nerve gas WMD and the government scrambles fighters to stop Spike, who is trying to stop the Big Bad, since they would rather cover up the problem rather than fix it. Despite the fact that the government pilots are elite special forces flying the most advanced planes in existence, Spike easily defeats them all using his fighter which is more like the The Alleged Car.
• Pete Pumps from Ginban Kaleidoscope was this before he died in Episode 1.
• Girls und Panzer has several Aces, but in tanks instead of planes or giant robots:
  • Ooarai: Anglerfish and Hippo team are both bushwackers, Turtle Team is a Sniper (but only when Anzu is on the gun), and the rest are Pluggers
  • St. Gloriana: Darjeeling is a plugger, Rosehip is a Steamroller
  • Saunders: Kay is a Steamroller, Alice is a Bushwacker, and Naomi is a sniper.
  • Anzio: Anchovy is a bushwacker by necessity
  • Pravda: Katyusha is a steamroller, Nonna is a sniper, and Klara is a plugger.
  • Kuromoromine: Maho is a steamroller, with the rest following in her style.
  • Jatkosota High School: Mika is a sniper, but Jouko is even more so.
  • Chi-ha-tan: Kinuyo and most of her team is a steamroller through and through, but Fukuda prefers a bushwhacker style instead.
  • University Team: Alice is a bushwhacker.
  • BC Freedom: Marie and Oshida are bushwhackers, Andou is a steamroller.
• Noriko Takaya evolves into one nearer the end of the series. Kazumi Amano and Jung Frued are introduced that way.
• Heavy Metal L-Gaim: Daba, Leccee, Gablet... most of the main characters, really.
• The Macross franchise has a bunch, and an interesting tradition of the best pilot in each show not being the main character:
  • Max Jenius in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and Milia Fallyna on the other side, until the two fell in love and she defected. Max takes this to such an extent that Word of God has confirmed him to be the best pilot in the franchise, bar none. Even when in his fifties and with somewhat "rusty" piloting skills in Macross 7, he still outperforms every other Ace in the series combined when he hops in a fighter.
    • While not the absolute best, protagonist Hikaru Ichijo was an extremely skilled pilot as well, as was his squad leader, Roy Focker.
  • Sylvie Gina and Nexx Gilbert in Macross II (The main character, Hibiki Kanzaki, is an Ace Reporter flying unarmed civilian craft instead).
  • The only reason why Isamu Dyson of Macross Plus hasn't been dishonorably discharged yet is because of his incredible piloting skills. He's still alive and active during the events Macross Frontier, and is mentioned in supplementary notes as having kicked Ozma's ass in training matches while piloting an outdated plane. His rival/former friend Guld Bowman is at least equally capable.
  • Gamlin Kizaki in Macross 7. Nekki Basara is arguably an even better pilot, but he's an Actual Pacifist.
  • In prequel Macross Zero, the aforementioned Roy Focker is the best pilot in the UN Spacy. His protege Shin Kudo is an excellent pilot as well, being able to even initially hold his own against a Variable Fighter... while piloting a regular F-14. Their main rivals DD Ivanov and Nora Polyansky are no slouches either, DD especially having trained Roy, and clearly a superior fighter.
  • Ozma Lee in Macross Frontier is SMS's best pilot, and possibly in the entire Frontier fleet; even near the end of the show, he is still able to out-duel main hero Alto Saotome by a couple of points due to his much greater experience and Alto being quite conflicted at the time. Michel, meanwhile, was the company's ace sniper. However, the show's best pilot is probably Brera Sterne, thanks in large part to him being a Cyborg.
  • Messer Ihlefeld in Macross Delta is Delta Squadron's ace, and easily shows the difference between honed skill and inexperienced raw talent whenever he effortlessly shows up protagonist Hayate Immelman's piloting. He frequently gets in duels with the Aerial Knights' own ace, Keith Windermere.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS has Nanoha in a high-ranking position in an alien air-force, the lack of planes not being an issue when you can fly without them. In fact, her official in-show nickname is "Ace of Aces". Her combat style is steamroller. It is worth noting that mages in Nanoha have strong shields, and mentally-guided projectiles help with aiming, so it's more a matter of "breaking through their shields with brute force" than "hoping they'll slip up and take a hit". The one ace Nanoha has never beaten in a square fight is Signum. She's the ultimate plugger, wearing down her enemies with a strong defense before unleashing her own Wave Motion Sword.
• In Magic Knight Rayearth, Eagle Vision is able to defeat all three Magic Knights / Mashin in his first sortie against them, due in part to his analysis of their weaknesses.
• The Magnificent Kotobuki features a whole squadron of Ace Pilots, with over 200 kills between them all, in inferior planes.
• Both Klaus and his mother of Maiden Rose are flying aces, Klaus having at least 10 confirmed kills marked on his plane's tail in one flashback.
• Akito Tenkawa of Martian Successor Nadesico, as well as his mentor Gai, do this, though the former is also known to use Bushwhacker-style tricks when the situation calls for it. Akatsuki & Ryoko are probably the best Aestivalis pilots in the series, though.
• In the Mazinger series, Kouji Kabuto and Duke Fleed grow into the role (specially Kouji. In the first chapters it was painfully obvious than he had no idea of how to pilot a war vehicle, and the consequences of it were just so painful to him. Nevertheless, through training and battles he became a true ace). However Tetsuya Tsurugi not only was trained into it before the series but also he is the Trope Codifier — and a deconstruction — of Hot-Blooded ace pilots in Humongous Mecha anime.
• Similar to the Lyrical Nanoha example above, My-Otome has plenty of aces among the Otome. The two top combat aces, Haruka and Shizuru, are textbook examples of the Steamroller and Bushwhacker respectively.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion gives us professional kid pilot Asuka to contrast Shinji, the epitome of Ordinary High-School Student spineless protagonists. Unfortunately all the piloting skill in the world won't save you. It will make you look like a Hot-Blooded badass in The Movie, though.
• Overman King Gainer has three main ace pilots Gainer Sanga, Gain Bijou, and Cynthia Lane.
• Noa Izumi from Patlabor. She's not really amazingly good, though, so much as always reliable, and in the ultimate Real Robot Genre series, that counts for a lot more. In one episode, her "forward" points out that her reaction time is worse than Ohta's, but her motions are more efficient (Ohta will start moving first, but Izumi will complete the action first).
• Porco Rosso: Porco was called the "Ace of the Adriatic" and Curtis is also known for his prowess in combat flying.
• Even Robotech follows Macross's tradition of the best pilot not being the main character (aside from Max and Miriya), with Maia Sterling in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles
  • Rook Bartley from the Third Robotech War/Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Also Lancer, for that matter.
• Science Ninja Team Gatchaman AKA Battle of the Planets AKA G-Force AKA Eagle Riders gives us two in Ken The Eagle (who is named Ace in G-Force) and the man known as Red Impulse.
• Shirobako has a production in its second half 3rd Aerial Girls Squadron, about a team of Ace Pilots flying outdated 1960s craft to fight an alien invasion.
• Lt. Fukai Rei from Sentou Yousei Yukikaze is an ace on his own right but his close relationship with his plane's AI makes him even more effective.
• Strike Witches features various historical World War II aces... re-imagined as teenage girls. With animal ears. And no pants. In terms of tactics, most of them appear to be Bushwhackers or Steamrollers, while Sanya and Lynette are Snipers.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Simon the Digger. For that matter, Kamina, Viral, Lordgenome... One could make a case for almost any main character who gets in a Gunmen.
• Shun Kuroeda in Tomica Hyper Rescue Drive Head Kidou Kyuukyuu Keisatsu. Specializing in sniping, he's a super-prodigy who can pilot a Drive Head despite not being "chosen" by the Drive Gear. And his skills are above-average, too.
• Lux Arcadia from Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle is one of the best pilots in the series thanks to his skill with nothing more than just a quack job Drag-Ride that easily wants to get shot down. His fighting style is a Plugger as he usually just turtles until the opponent gets tired out but that's because he's just using the fight as nothing more than a training exercise.
• In The Vision of Escaflowne, the heroes are both Steamrollers by default. Warrior Prince Van and Knight In Shining Armour Allan both pilot Lightning Bruiser Guymelefs armed only with swords, forcing them to quickly close with the enemy and overwhelm them with skillful swordplay. Interesting, The Dragon Dilandua and his henchmen are clearly Bushwackers and Snipers, using stealth technology and advanced ranged weaponry to try to overwhelm the heroes rather than going toe to toe with them. Given the themes of honour and chivalry in the show, this contrast is more than a little thematically appropriate.

• In Guardian Fairy Michel, Kim can pilot Honeybee in any situation and uses all of its modes to their finest capabilities.

• Arrowsmith is about the title character's gradual growth into one in a fantasy version of World War One.
• In Athena Voltaire, Athena is an aviatrix by profession, having been part of an air circus (which she got involved with thanks to her father, who knew people in the world of travelling entertainment thanks to being a stage magician). She then became a pilot for hire, which is behind most of her adventures. She's good enough to take out attacking fighters more than once without needing to shoot back.
• The Blackhawks
• In Chassis, anyone who competes in the Aero-run has to be an ace pilot by definition. This includes Chassis McBain.
• Combat Kelly and his Deadly Dozen: In later issues, the Dozen acquired their own ace pilot in the form of Jack 'Mad Dog' Martin, the so-called 'scourge of the airways' until he supposedly lost his nerve.
• Examples from DC Comics war features:
  • Johnny Cloud, aka "The Navajo Ace" (a literal WWII ace)
  • Hans Von Hammer in Enemy Ace.
  • Steve Savage, the Balloon Buster in WWI.
  • In Hunter's Hellcats, Snake Oil worked for a time as a barnstormer in carnivals before the war. He is in charge of flying the planes the Hellcats frequently steal when escaping enemy territory.
• Deff Skwadron:
  • Kommanda Uzgob has flown 52 missions by the end of the comic, leading to 14 dogfight victories, 89 assorted other kills and only two lost airplanes. By orkish standards, he's probably one of the best there ever was.
  • Killboy is the official Deff Skwadron ace, having flown 34 missions, scoring 10 dogfight victories and 60 other assorted kills. He's lost 36 airplanes, mostly thanks to his unorthodox flying style^note he twice managed to hijack an enemy airplane, get back into the air, and then ram that one into an enemy as well.
• Lord Richard Quackett from the Disney Ducks Comic Universe is implied to be one, having flown in World War I — as a balloon buster (see below in the Real Life section) and lived to tell.
• The Marvel version of G.I. Joe had several ace pilots on both sides. Ace (Definite steamroller, going straight at Wild Weasel's nose at the end of their first match, and winning by detonating weapons dangerously close to him in their most recent match), Slipstream, Wild Bill (For helicopters instead of fighter planes), and Maverick come to mind for the Joes. Wild Weasel (Bushwhacker/plugger, likely only a plugger due to the toughness of the Cobra Rattler) was one for Cobra.
• Jack Fury (the father of MARVEL badass Nick Fury) was a pilot in the war.
• Marvel had The Phantom Eagle, a pilot who fought for the USA in World War I. Because he had relatives in Germany, he had to fly as a masked mystery man.
• French 1960s (and onward) Tanguy Et Laverdure had Michel Tanguy and Ernest Laverdure.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman herself is usually an excellent pilot, she does have an invisible plane after all which is usually some kind of Amazonian fighter.
  • Steve Trevor is almost always an excellent pilot regardless of continuity. It's evidently an inherited trait as his mother was one as well, as a flight trainer and one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): One of the galactic slaves who aids in Diana's slave revolt and joins the revolution used to be a pilot and quickly jumps back into the role. She's able to skillfully pilot all sorts of captured Sangtee Empire vessels. While neither she nor her race are ever named she resembles Green Lantern Xrill-Vrex
  • In addition to making Steve strictly an excelent pilot instead of him also being a spy The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) adds another great pilot to the supporting cast; Lt. Lawrence Stone, one of the Tuskeegee Airmen.
• Baron Eric von Emmelman was World War One German flying ace who was hot down over a Polish swamp in 1918. After rising as The Heap some 24 years later, some later stories had him take to the skies again despite being a near-mindless Muck Monster: the long buried instincts of Eric allowing him to fly fighter planes against Axis flyers.

• Snoopy from Peanuts flies his doghouse with the best of them as World War I Flying Ace, arch-rival to the Red Baron.
• Steve Canyon, among many others from his strip's long run.
• Dude Hennick from Terry and the Pirates.

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fanfiction, Lauren Griffin gets to demonstrate her pilot skills again when she makes a particularly sharp turn with her Osprey to Outrun the Fireball.
• A Crown of Stars: Although she was very broken when the story starts out, Asuka was her squad's best pilot, with the greater number of kills. During a scene Ching praises her performance during the battle of the Geofront and when she and Shinji used a barely-moving prototype mecha in Germany to fight and defeat several fully-functional MP-Evas. Later she has a new Transforming Mecha and kicks butts with it.
• Advice and Trust: Asuka is the best Humongous Mecha pilot in the base, having trained since she was four and devoting her life to it. As they bond, Shinji and Rei also improve their performance with their war machines.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction A Kingdom Divided, Rainbow Dash and Lightning Dust are those, of a bushwhacker kind. Flitter and Cloudchaser, on the other hand, employ a tactics of steamrolling an airship with 20 mm automatic cannons.
• The Child of Love: Among the main characters, Asuka is the best Humongous Mecha pilot. She even fought and killed an Eldritch Abomination while pregnant. She fought that battle so hard her teammates were amazed.
• Children of an Elder God: Shinji, Asuka and Rei are more skillful and more competent than their canon selves. In their first engagement, Shinji and Rei managed to kill an humongous spider-alike Eldritch Abomination had turned the whole city into a giant cobweb infested with billions of spiders. In her first engagement Asuka tore a Sea Monster to bloodied pieces when it got her angry. And every time they killed a new Eldritch Abomination they became more powerful.
• Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron: Kallen arguably the best pilot of the team, rivaled only by Suzaku. As all of the Paladins pilot Empathic Weapons, though, what type they are is up for debate.
• Doing It Right This Time: Asuka travels to Tokyo-3 early to help with Shinji and Rei's training. When Shinji asks if she is right with them getting kills while she remains benched, Asuka replies she is rationalizing that it will be thanks to her training. Shinji replies it is not a rationalization because she was the best pilot and he was just lucky.
• Inthe Shadowof Gods: Joker gets to show of his skills by catching Shepard and the Chief in one of the Normandy's side doors as the pair flies through space.
• Evangelion 303: The Children and their wingmen are young but accomplished pilots. The best in the base are Asuka — a steamroller — and Shinji — a bushwhacker — (and possibly Kaworu).
• HERZ: Shinji, Asuka and Rei are all excellent Humongous Mecha pilots with more than one decade of experience, although Shinji is the only one still has a functional Eva, and he seldom sorties.
• Last Child of Krypton: Asuka had prepared her whole life to pilot war mechas and fight giant alien monsters, spending twelve years of hard training and rigorous preparation. She was the best pilot in the base, but every time she sortied and her skill seemed to be insufficient, her fragile self-esteem deteriorated, which in turn made piloting her mecha harder. By the end she had become unable to pilot... but since she had gained super-powers for that point, she did not mind much.
• Once More with Feeling: After returning to the past, Shinji's performance with his giant robot gets his co-workers impressed and shocked, since they did not expect he was so good. However he considers that Asuka is better pilot and fighter than he could never be, and when he meets for first time —again — he takes care of praising her skill, knowing her confidence is very fragile.
• The One I Love Is...: Asuka trained very hard since she was three to be the best mecha pilot ever. However, her frequent defeats eroded her fragile confidence progressively until her mind snapped. However she still got to show how good she was when she ripped the MP-Evas apart.
• Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton: Asuka was the best and most rigorously trained pilot in the squad, and she got a good number of kills under her belt. However, as the story progressed and her powers surfaced she got to choose between remaining a pilot or being a super-heroine full-time.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide, Asuka was her squad's best pilot, even although she was constantly defeated. When another alien monster attacked the base in chapter 6, she was the only one capable of defeating it.
• In Thousand Shinji, Asuka is not only her squad's best mecha pilot but also her world's master of physical combat. Her final battle against the MP-Evas is described in-story as "a hive mind of nine killing machines versus the perfect single warrior."
• Landing Day: Veen and Garasso, who are part of Harbinger 2-6's striker force. Both easily outpace their fellow Strikers and take out several of the human fighters.
• The Discworld of A.A. Pessimal sees the evolution of the Air Watch, from its beginnings in a couple of Feegle mounted on tamed birds, to incorporate Lancre-trained Witches with a passion for flight. Olga and Irena become the first two Air Witches in the Watch. As the need for pilots expands, and the Watch acquires a brace of Pegasus flying horses, more skills are learnt and with a greater number of Witches graduating from training in Lancre looking for jobs, the very best witch-pilots are recruited to what becomes, by degrees, an Air Force. Olga Romanoff finds herself being regarded as the best flying Witch in the world; at the latest point in the evolution of Ankh-Morpork's Air Force, she finds herself commanding the best part of sixty fliers and proficient in a bewildering variety of flying Devices. Part of her backstory involves fighting in the air over Lancre, during the Elven invasion described in The Shepherd's Crown, and leading her pilots in knocking down quite a lot of air-capable Elves on yarrow stalks, thus qualifying herself — and several other witch-pilots — as combat Aces. This tale is here. Olga boasts all four types in her command:
  • The Steamroller: Hanna von Strafenburg
  • The Bushwhacker: Tatiana Grigorenko
  • The Sniper: Kiiki Pekkissalen
  • The Plugger: Olga Romanoff herself.
• Strikers 89: Lt. Frank "Warhound" Bishop is an almost textbook example of a Steamroller, flying his aircraft incredibly aggressively.
• Strikers 2016: Lt. Morgan Laroux-Bishop is a hybrid Bushwhacker/Sniper, relying on opening a fight with very large volleys of long-range air to air missiles, followed by exploiting the resulting confusion and panic to eliminate any surviving enemy aircraft.
• Batman 1939: Captain Steve Trevor calls himself the best flyboy America has, and a captive Body Snatcher is unworried by their plane being fired on because she's seen his memories and knows he really is that good.

• Hiccup from the How to Train Your Dragon series is a dragon rider example. It's notable that, unlike the other riders, Hiccup is just a much of a part of the flying processes as his dragon, Toothless, due to the prosthetic tailfin he made for him, that is controlled via left pedal.

• Always: Quite a few among the aerial firefighters, but Pete stands head and shoulders above the rest, with Ted eventually rising to a similar stature.
• Battle of Britain contains a number of aces who are expies of real-life pilots like Adolf Galland (who was hired as an advisor for the film), Werner Mölders and "Sailor" Malan.
• For a more modern Hollywood's view of German fighter aces in World War One watch The Blue Max and Von Richthofen and Brown.
• Chain Lightning: Matt, who apparently is the best pilot alive. In the extended flashback sequence Matt leads a B-17 over Germany and manages to make it back alive despite being attacked by a German jet. Carl recruits him specifically because if Matt flies the JA-3, General Hewitt will sign off on the military acquiring the plane. Matt then makes a difficult flight from Nome to the North Pole to Washington, running out of gas but still making the landing.
• Frantisek Slama and Karel Vojtisek in Dark Blue World, a Czech movie about Czech pilots serving in RAF during World War II.
• Darling Lili features several World War I Ace Pilots, including the leading man Bill Larrabee, as well as the Red Baron himself.
• Both versions of The Dawn Patrol contain a number of them, both within the R.F.C. squadron and in its nemesis, the high-scoring German ace.
• Dunkirk has Farrier shooting down several Stukas, including taking one out over the titular beach while gliding on no fuel (having spent it all on getting there from the UK). Unfortunately, his reward for his efforts is having no choice but to land in German-controlled territory, where he presumably spends the rest of the war as a POW.
• First Man emphasizes the difficulty and danger of flights the Gemini and Apollo astronauts go through to show just how skilled they are. In the opening scene, Neil takes an X-15 to the edge of the atmosphere and avoids bouncing off into space.
• The main character in the 1926 silent film The Flying Ace, as evidenced by the title. The film actually takes place after he's come back from World War I, but his flying skills nonetheless come in useful.
• Galaxy Quest: While Laredo from the Show Within a Show is an example of this trope, his actor Tommy Weber isn't, which is shown when he first has to fly an actual starship (a copy of the show's ship built by the Thermians). Later on, though, he's told to practice flying, which he does by rewatching old episodes and getting the hang of the controls. Surprisingly, this works and he's significantly better during the final battle when he's told to scrape a mine field in order to get the magnetic mines to drag behind the Protector in order to slam them against the Big Bad's ship.
• Ripcord from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, despite supposedly being U.S. Army Special Forces rather than a pilot (Handwaved early on by a mention of him scoring really high in a flight training program, and wanting all along to go into the Air Force). He's even openly referred to as "Ace" once or twice by other characters.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: Kiriko Tsujimori. She somehow manages to wrestle the Griffon, a fairly big and bulky prototype VTOL, onto a Shibuya rooftop even after the controls have been rendered almost inoperable. Later, she pilots the same VTOL up high enough for a satellite tracking system to lock onto it, then dives back down and slams it into Godzilla in a kamikaze attack, only bailing out at the last second.
  • Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla: Akane Yashiro, the pilot of Mechagodzilla, is a Humongous Mecha variation of this trope. She was able to force Godzilla into a stalemate, in a damaged mech no less.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): Lauren Griffin. Her Monarch profile says she was picked to join Monarch's G-Team because of her proven skills as a pilot when under fire. In the film proper, she manages to keep an Osprey with a downed rotor aloft whilst flying underneath Ghidorah's hurricane, and she manages to make a hard landing in the Argo's hangar bay whilst dodging a discarded other Osprey and cargo bay doors.
• Another early film fighter ace is von Rauffenstein (played by Erich von Stroheim) in The Grand Illusion, although the dogfight in which he downs two of the film's protagonists is not shown.
• The Great Waldo Pepper: Most of the main characters, but the German ace Ernst Kessler is the one they all are trying to match.
• Captain Steven Hiller in Independence Day, who managed to take out an alien fighter ship surrounded by an impenetrable force field using some tricky flying and his parachute, in a dogfight that destroyed the entire rest of his squadron. Later, he pilots another alien fighter ship in execution of a plan that would lead to the destruction of a mothership a quarter the size of the moon, and containing probably several thousand colony ships and the vast majority of the alien race.
• Cooper in Interstellar. At first only an Informed Attribute, he later proves to be an Ace Pilot when docking onto the wildly rotating spaceship without losing consciousness and when pulling off the Spaceship Slingshot Stunt around the black hole.
• Iron Eagle is all about this as well, as a Follow the Leader to Top Gun. Doug Masters is so good that he can outfly veteran pilots as a teenager with no formal training.
• Captain Brieux in The Island at the Top of the World, who maneuvers his Cool Airship the Hyperion through some impossibly tight spaces, and keeps her aloft during the worst of weather.
• It's a Wonderful Life: George's brother Harry becomes one during the war, single-handedly shooting down two kamikaze that were about to ram a transport carrying troops. Had he not been there, as George finds out during the It's a Wonderful Plot sequence, every man on that transport would have died.
• It Happened One Night: Ellie Andrew's fiance, King Westley, is described as one of the best pilots in the country. He displays his prowess by arriving at their wedding in an autogyro.
• I Wanted Wings has three: Jeff, John, and Al.
• Alex in The Last Starfighter is a variation. He is a gunner, not a pilot, on what is essentially an outer space weapons platform (which lacks the maneuverability of the typical Ace Pilot vehicle), but he basically fulfills this trope.
• Lost in Space — Major Don West gets assigned to the expedition because of his piloting skills (and problems with authority). Bonus points because the General who assigns Major West to the expedition is none other than Mark Goddard... the original Major West from the TV series!
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor: The Dark World: Loki claims he is this and proves it by being able to safely steer through a small crevice in an Asgardian rockface at high speed which is just barely wide enough for the ship — a lesser pilot would've crashed.
  • Captain Marvel: Prior to getting her powers, Carol was a USAF pilot. She and her friend Maria are both skilled aviators, though Maria has more actual piloting to do once Carol discovers she can fly. Carol gets herself and Nick Fury safely to Louisiana just as she's reclaiming her memories, and Maria defeats the Kree soldier Minn-Erva in an Aerial Canyon Chase.
• Only Angels Have Wings is about the pilots of a rinky-dink South American airline who routinely have to make hazardous trips over the Andes and back in rickety propeller planes. In the climactic action sequence one pilot manages to get his plane back over the pass and through a storm, after a bird comes crashing through the windshield and one engine and the nose catch on fire. He lands safely.
• Rafe and Danny of Pearl Harbor.
• Red Tails: Lightning and Easy are the best pilots in the squadron, but everyone is a fighter pilot.
• The Right Stuff has gobs of them, not just the Mercury astronauts and Mr. Ace Pilot, Chuck Yeager himself, but peripheral characters such as Slick and Scott Crossfield. They were doing stuff back in the Fifties that would make Travis Pastrana wet his pants even today. Made even more awesome because it's all true.
  • Hell, Pancho Barnes, the lady who owns the bar that Yeager frequents, was doing that stuff back in the 1920s.
• Wash from Serenity. But then, he is a leaf on the wind.
• Star Wars:
  • Han Solo flies around in what seems like a junky ship, hardly able to fly, and yet he manages to evade and confuse Imperial fleets, while wittily insulting C-3PO and flirting up the Princess. The Millennium Falcon is often referenced as one of the better in the galaxy: it looks like a scrap heap because Han believes functionality is more important than looks. But regardless of the upgrades, the fact that Han outflies fighters in a transport remains very impressive.
  • Luke Skywalker, who has a Death Star to his credit in his first time flying an X-wing.
  • Luke's father Anakin Skywalker, who was outflying professional fighter pilots by the time he was 9! Obi-Wan referred to him as "the best star-pilot in the galaxy". He only gets to show off his skills once in the original trilogy (as Darth Vader in the attack against the first Death Star), but shines more in the prequels.
    • Special mention goes to an the incident in Revenge of the Sith where Anakin pilots General Grievous's flagship to a crash landing on Coruscant. The film makes it look like a simple, if rather large crash. The novelization explains exactly how much work Anakin was doing to keep the ship from breaking up, including using the Force to open and close hatches to tweak its descent by millimeters. Keep in mind this is something the size of a Star Destroyer with no engines. It's justly considered his greatest feat of piloting.
  • Wedge Antilles one-ups Luke: He has two Death Stars on his plane. (Luke was doing something more important during the second one, but nonetheless.) Wedge's first silhouette is because he attacked the place and lived to tell about it, something that can only be claimed by two other people: Luke Skywalker and Keyan Farlander, both of whom are The Hero (the latter is the Featureless Protagonist of the X-Wing video games) and both of whom are also Force-sensitive. Wedge really does deserve some Badass Normal points here. Aside from the two Death Stars he also has so many fighter kills that his ground crew chief switched to painting on kill marks for whole squadrons instead of single ships because he ran out of room on the X-Wing's flank.
  • Lando Calrissian, the Millennium Falcon's previous owner, who also helped fight the second Death Star.
  • Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens is described in the opening crawl as one of the Resistance's best pilots. When he comes back with The Cavalry after being presumed dead, he Steamrollers ten TIE fighters in ten seconds, making him possibly the most literal "instant ace" in the franchise! Also, when sprung from the brig on a First Order Star Destroyer and asked if he can fly a TIE Fighter to get them off the ship, he responds that he can fly anything. He proves this right by having instantly figuring out the controls of a fighter he's never flown before, and even instructing Finn on how to operate the controls of the back-seat turret despite only getting a brief glimpse at those controls while climbing into the pilot seat.
  • In The Force Awakens Rey steals a starship that hasn't flown in decades (and was basically falling apart before it was abandoned) and absolutely embarrasses several TIE fighter pilots while navigating through a junkyard on Jakku. And she does it all without a copilot, which Han never managed. Justified in that she is later revealed to have latent Force powers.
  • Kylo Ren proves to be a pretty damn good pilot himself during the pursuit of the Resistance fleet in The Last Jedi. Pretty appropriate considering that he's related to three of the other aces on this page. He leads an assault on the Resistance's flagship and comes through unscathed despite the heavy crossfire. Kylo Ren takes out the Resistance's entire complement of X-wings with one missile, completely crippling their ability to fight back. Then, he gets a clear shot at the bridge of the flagship, and would have taken out the Resistance's entire senior leadership, if not for the Force and the fact that his mother was on the bridge.
• Amber of Sucker Punch in the dream sequences. She not only pilots bombers, but she has also piloted a Mini-Mecha.
• Test Pilot is about just that, a test pilot who pushes experimental planes to the limits of their performance and beyond. It's a dangerous job.
• Top Gun may be the quintessential modern Ace Pilot film, featuring the eponymous advanced flight combat school that you don't even get into unless you're already "the best of the best". Iceman in particular is described as a Steamroller. To paraphrase Goose, he just stays on you and harries you until you make a mistake. Viper and Jester at one point collaborate as a Plugger and Bushwhacker/Sniper respectively, with Viper drawing Maverick off while Jester sneaks up on him from behind. Maverick doesn't really have any single style since he flies almost entirely on instinct, even stating at one point, "You think, you're dead."
• Top Gun: Maverick features its own set of characters who are ace pilots. In particular, Hangman flies mostly like Maverick does in the first film, but he also has a penchant for using his own wingman as bait while he moves in to ambush the opponent while he's distracted, making him somewhat fitting the Bushwhacker style. Rooster, meanwhile, flies more cautiously and would often waits for the right moment to strike his opponent - which may or may not come, meaning that he would make a good Plugger if he learns to keep himself more composed and capitalize on his advantages. Phoenix and Payback don't really show a particular style, but their personalities during training imply that they seem to prefer to attack their opponents directly, making them closer to Steamrollers. As for Maverick himself, he qualifies as an official Ace Pilot by the end of the film when he shot down two more enemy planes, which adds up to the three kills he had in the first film, making him qualify the fifth confirmed kill needed to become the first ace pilot of the 21st Century.
• Wing Commander has Christopher "Maverick" Blair and Todd "Maniac" Marshall. They're both rookies aboard the TCS Tiger's Claw, but Maniac shows his skills early on, despite some authority issues. He's also chosen by the wing commander to escort an assault team on a Kilrathi command-and-control ship. Meanwhile, Blair not only manages to jump a fighter thanks to his Pilgrim heritage but also lures a large Kilrathi warship to a gravity well while doding fire before pulling away. Their wing commander "Angel" Deveraux also has her own moment to shine when she chases down a cloaked torpedo and blows it up before it can strike the Claw, barely managing to survive when the blast wave catches up to her.
• The very first Oscar-winning film, Wings, has Jack, a World War I ace.

• There were plenty of "air adventure" series for boys written as propaganda during WWII (and a few during the '30s). Dave Dawson, Red Randall, Lucky Terrell, and A Yank in the RAF were just a few.
• Aeon 14 has protagonist Tanis Richards' Love Interest Joe Evans, a man talented with both Space Fighters and shuttles. It's mentioned that his Bio-Augmentation includes mods to let him withstand much higher g-forces than non-pilots can, Tanis included (she has to do some nanotechnology MacGyvering to survive a hard burn in book 2, but Joe is unaffected). A memorable scene in Outsystem has a merc attack against Intrepid get foiled by his fancy flying of a cargo shuttle. Late in the chase, mercs emerge from a hiding place aboard the shuttle and hold the heroes at gunpoint. Then there's a sudden jolt, the mercs' aim is thrown off, and Tanis and the Space Marines fill them with holes.
  Joe: Oops, did I clip that cargo net? Sorry about that.
• There are plenty of examples in Armada. Most of the protagonists including Zack, RedJive, etc are Ace Pilots (technically, they are drone pilots). RedJive actually goes by the name of The Red Baron.
• Bereth in The Arts of Dark and Light is the fantasy equivalent, a skilled hawk rider in Elebrion's air force. Much of her plot arc concerns military actions when her country is invaded.
• In Banco, Papillon teams up with a pilot named Carotte. He served in World War II by transporting spies in and out of German-occupied France, sometimes landing his plane with no other visual aid than torches at night. He's a masterful pilot and completely reckless, not afraid of Buzzing the Deck for his amusement, able to land on sloped beaches with a wing trailing in the water, and finally sets down in the middle of a rough road when they're running low on fuel.
• Biggles largely helped to cement the trope's popularity during and after WWII, especially to a British audience.
• The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover set during World War I, that sees Biggles, Captain Midnight and The Shadow go up against the Red Baron, Hans von Hammer and Airboy's ally the Heap. Oh, and they're all vampires! Extra-superpowered vampires powered by Weird Science, even.
• The Bounty Hunter Wars: N'dru Suhlak is a hotshot pilot who washed out of the Rebel Alliance for insubordination and makes a living transporting wanted fugitives away from bounty hunters. Prior to the events of Slave Ship, he's eluded or destroyed the ship of very bounty hunter who pursued him.
• Simon Black, the Australian hero of the 1950's 'Boys Own'-type adventure series by Ivan Southall.
• Benjamin St. John of the Descent novels is described as having the potential to be the "greatest pilot of the century", which he has not quite achieved. But by the second book, with all the insane wacky piloting he does, no one's doubting the truth behind that statement. Most of his success lies in the fact that he has a habit of taking ludicrous risks and somehow making it out alive (he once, without any propelling power left in his plane, glided into a Martian sandstorm to evade his pursuers).
• In the Discworld, Nanny Ogg takes the Dwarf Casanunder on the pillion of her broomstick. Once he gets over the fact that a couple of thousand feet up with nothing underneath him is not a comfortable place for a Dwarf to be, he proves to be a very effective air-gunner with a crossbow as he and Nanny set about knocking flying Elves out of the sky. The Elven yarrow stalk may be faster and more manoevreable than a broomstick; but Nanny and Casanunder demonstrate that an airborne Elf is something of a Glass Cannon. She easily becomes an Ace that night over Lancre.
• In Dragonriders of Pern, Anne McCaffrey said that she intentionally modeled the personalities of many of her dragonriders on the Ace Pilot archetype, and for very much the same reasons — they're engaged in an incredibly dangerous business where quick reflexes are critical for survival, said business is critical for the survival of humanity, and the risk of horrible death looms over every flight.
• In The Dreamside Road, Orson Gregory is an odd example of the plugger class of ace. He’s extremely dangerous in the air, but most of his apparent skill comes from creativity and his years of practice, instead of the usual technical mastery. When chased by the Liberty Corps fighters, he makes up for his limited dogfighting experience with his years of casual flight experience and personal ingenuity.
• In The Flight Engineer the protagonist, Commander Peter Raeder, has seven confirmed kills to his name which makes him the first ace of the Commonwealth/Mollie conflict. Unfortunately, in the same engagement where he scored his last four kills he also lost his hand, ending his career as a fighter pilot.
• In The Black Gryphon, Skandranon is the finest flier among Urtho's gryphons. Skandranon is also called "The Black Gryphon" because he has his feathers painted black. He utilizes both Steamroller and Bushwhacker styles, and his M.O. tends to be "get in way over my head, then improvise my way through it."
• Mary in It Can't Happen Here. Galvanized by her husband's murder and her father's incarceration, she joins the Corpo Women's Flying Corps and trains as a bomber pilot. She is later assigned to escort District Commissioner Swan's plane to Washington. She crashes her plane into Swan's, killing Swan, his aides, and herself.
• Jack Ryan has Lt. Colonel Dan Malloy, a hot hand at using his chopper to get Team Rainbow into place. He's promoted to flying the President around by the next book.
  • Recurring character Bronco Winters shows up in several books (specifically Clear and Present Danger, Executive Orders (though he isn't named), and The Bear And the Dragon). He makes ace (five kills) by Executive Orders, though because some of his kills are classified from a special operation, he's not "officially" an ace until The Bear and the Dragon, where, in his first engagement, he gets five confirmed kills and makes it look easy. He becomes a double ace (ten kills) in the very next engagement.
• The Kaiju Preservation Society: Martin Satie is the pilot of Tanaka Base's Chopper Two. He's a master pilot, who's got lots of experience getting close to kaijus and flying circles around them. Probably closest to the Bushwhacker style, though one could make a case for Plugger. Colonel Martin Satie is officially the Royal Canadian Air Force liason to Tanaka Base, but paperwork is boring and flying helicopters around kaiju is interesting.
• Lacuna has Alex "Jazz" Aharoni, who comes aboard the ship as the best pilot the Israeli air-force could muster.
• The Lost Starship has Keith Maker, a former strikerfighter ace who fought on the losing side of a civil war, losing his brother in the process. He retired, returned to his native Scotland, and opened a bar. In the first novel, he is recruited by Captani Maddox for the crazy mission to find and tame an ancient alien warship in order to give the Commonwealth a chance against the New Men. Maker (who has been granted the rank of ensign) has to struggle with being The Alcoholic, as well as his Survivor Guilt, but he prevails and shows off his piloting skills numerous times. [[spoiler:At the end of the first novel, he is promoted to second lieutenant and offered a join a new training program for an elite unit. Considering his hands itch when he isn't holding control sticks, he gladly accepts.
• Orion: First Encounter : Erin becomes this, despite still being a young student, via a computer that rewires her brain.
• Captain Bertholt, a minor character in The Outlaws, is the commander of the Bavarian battalion during the Kapp rebellion. He served as a fighter pilot in WW 1 with the ultimate score of 55 enemies shot down (this is the number mentioned in the book; in Real Life Bertholt had only 45 aerial victories).
• In the Larry Bond novel Red Phoenix set during a Second Korean War, one USAF F-16 pilot gets over 13 North Korean aircraft before being shot down. He is rescued by South Korean Special Forces, survives the novel and gets the girl.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen is one of the few people skilled enough to fly skyships and similar vehicles with all safeties disengaged. Everyone who has every flown with him at the helm thinks of these maneuvers as absolutely crazy, but Daylen makes them work. As the inventor of the annihilator, he's brought aerial destruction like nothing his world has ever seen, as well.
• In The Sixth Battle, there is a discussion of ace pilots among the pilots of Langley, some who get the title themselves.
• In Space Glass Nicora Eidenburg and Marvelous Dagon both show their expertise. Marvelous in particular out maneuvers an entire army.
• Star Carrier has Trevor "Sandy" Gray, who earns his nickname after ordering his squad to launch AMSO (also known as "sand") canisters, typically used as a missile shield, at near-c speeds at a large alien fleet that has invaded the Solar System. The result? A massive shotgun blast that cripples the alien armada, forcing it to retreat even before the capital ships arrive. This becomes a standard tactic in later books. Gray is also notable for coming from a "Prim" background, having grown up in the flooded ruins of Manhattan with no modern technology. Gray ends up not only surviving to become an admiral twenty years later, but also engages in negotiations with the Sh'daar Masters, which results in a ceasefire. It's actually not uncommon for Space Fighter pilots to have capital ship kills on their record, considering their standard armament includes dozens of powerful nuclear missiles, a KK cannon, and a particle beam projector. Standard fleet tactics also dictate launching several squadrons as soon as a fleet arrives to a hostile system, with the fighters accelerating to near-c speeds using gravitic propulsion and then launching nukes at those speeds. The impact of a nuke, traveling at relativistic speeds, usually destroys any ship.
• In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Double Eagle, every single protagonist is one of these. Oskar Viltry is a rare bomber-flying version Though later he switches to fighters. The primary ace on the Chaos side is a Bushwhacker, who is ultimately defeated by tricking him into getting too focused on a single target (something repeatedly mentioned to be a cardinal sin in a large-scale dogfight). While the Chaos pilot was concentrating on trying to tag a skilled Plugger, a Sniper was able to draw a bead on him.
• The Wild Blue and the Grey is an alternate history novel in which the Confederate States of America participate in WWI on the Western Front (having been helped to independence by the French and British). The protagonist is a Cherokee pilot (Oklahoma is also independent and allied with the Confederacy) with the Confederate Air Corps named Amos Ninekiller; after he starts racking up kills the press starts hoping he'll actually score nine so that they can write a puntastic headline. William Faulkner is a pilot in the same unit.
• Mack Maloney's Wingman series features a number of Ace Pilots among the protagonists, but especially Hawk Hunter, the title character.
• The X-Wing Series in the Star Wars Legends delves quite deeply into the fighter pilots of the Rebels/New Republic, as led by Wedge Antilles. The first of the Wraith Squadron sub-series has the New Meat pilots ask Wes Janson and Wedge who was the best pilot they ever flew with: the two of them reminisce at length about skilled pilots who died due to bad luck, and others like Skywalker who had incredible skills but moved on to other things. Wes concludes that the only real way to objectively measure pilot skill is total kill count and survivability, making Wedge Antilles (the only pilot to survive both Death Star runs) the best pilot in history. Wedge, naturally, demurs. All sorts of pilot types, especially The Ace, make appearances, and there are discussions of the five-kill rule, becoming an "instant ace", rivalries between pilots, and many more. Demonstrations of styles include:
  • Wes Janson — Definite Sniper, though with better dogfighting skills than the typical Sniper. He's a sniper with any ranged weapon, in or out of the cockpit. Most of the time he doesn't even need sights; he can tell with his eyes alone when an enemy is in his line of fire, whether they're a TIE Fighter a kilometer away in a dogfight or Stormtroopers to both sides of him while dual-wielding blaster pilosts.
  • Wedge Antilles — Most likely Steamroller. Against most opponents, he's simply too good to be nailed down to a particular tactic, but when the enemy has him boxed up, he tends to get increasingly daring. Further, his save of Luke, in the original movie, is pure steamroller. He's noticed his own Plot Armor, and at the start of the series the kill silhouettes painted on his X-Wing include two Death Stars and an alarming number of other big ships. He's shot down so many starfighters by that point that a mechanic apologizes for not being able to fit them all into the space allotted, and had to render some in red, marking a squadron's worth of kills. Being Wedge, it makes no difference to him how his kills are grouped; he never brags about being one of the best pilots in history.
    
    He's shown to have a strange grasp on what his opponents are thinking and what they'll do — before they do it. It's powerful enough that he once calls it "precognitive", though immediately after that he chalks it up to pure pattern-recognition gained through endless hours of experience. Wedge also has the ability to think incredibly fast in high stress situations, taking the circumstances in and making a complicated decision in a second or less. This has nothing to do with the Force.
  • Wedge has a counterpart in his brother-in-law Worthy Opponent Baron Fel, who is the page image. Fel is skilled enough that it's canon he reestablishes the Empire...
  • Tycho Celchu — Probably Bushwhacker. His flying style is described by a Force-sensitive opponent (who is also a phenomenal pilot) as being incredibly complex, with him constantly thinking of ways to box in the enemy, anticipating his moves, and potential paths out of the line of fire and back to a position behind the enemy. Wedge once says, "You see a target coming in, you see him launch missiles, choose one vector for him and fire in that direction. One time in ten you'll choose right and you'll vape him. Unless you're Tycho Celchu, when it's one time in four."
  • Derek "Hobbie" Klivian is a pilot known for his remarkable skill at surviving, despite runs of bad luck; few of his tactics are seen, but his ability to keep alive, turning even lethal shots into hits that allow him to eject and recover, may be evidence of being of Plugger.
  • There are plenty of other pilots, but those illustrate the styles best. Another EU book, Death Star, makes it clear that Darth Vader doesn't really fit any category, except perhaps the double-secret probationary Sniperollbushplugwhacker. He was able to make the second best Imperial pilot, pictured above, who is good enough to make a decent protagonist pilot feel like a child who can barely walk trying to keep up with a champion distance runner, look like a clueless farmboy. Casually. Without using a targeting computer, which, the protagonist believes, is outright impossible. The Force — and to be completely accurate, thirty-plus years of experience and ageless cybernetic components — helps pilots, clearly. Another thing to take into account is just how much of Vader's body is cybernetic. Think about how a pilot experiences extreme movement of blood from the extremities to the brain during strenuous maneuvers. Now think about a pilot without extremities, whose body doesn't have the same necessities as a typical human. And give him the power of the force. In Death Star, after flying against Vader in practice the top TIE pilot on the station narrates that, if he ever ends up on the wrong end of Vader's guns for real, he'll just self-destruct his ship to save time.
  • Special mention goes to Kell Tainer, an ex-mechanic whose expertise stems from detailed knowledge of his fighter's systems and capabilities. On several occasions, he can perform on-the-fly analysis of damage to his or other pilots' fighters, can direct precision strikes on enemy capital ships, and push the technical limits of his ship as far as it'll go. His most noteworthy performance is attempting to ram an allied fighter out of a terminal dive; although he failed to save her, his sheer nerve and improvisation earned him awards.
  • Luke Skywalker gets another mention here. In total piloting ability, he's in the same neighborhood as his father, and in some books he's shown racking up an impressive count of enemy fighters. Part of this ability, of course, comes from being a Jedi, and his ability to use the Force to augment his senses pushes his piloting ability far beyond what his purely mundane skills would allow. Even before receiving Jedi training, however, he was a highly-skilled bush pilot.
  • In the X-Wing Series' ninth book, Starfighters of Adumar, the titular planet is a Planet of Hats where Ace Pilots are the elite of society. But since it's also a Proud Warrior Race which sees no point in simulator practice, and the attrition rates of new pilots are appalling, none of them are very skilled. Even those with obvious native talent rarely live long enough to become truly skilled. This means that when the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant send their best pilots alive there on a diplomatic function, said pilots are all but worshiped. And subject to endless attempts to kill them for their status.
  • Another special mention should go to Wedge's eldest daughter, Syal Antilles, who manages to fight Luke Skywalker to a standstill in a dogfight. Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker. That's a feat few, if anyone else, can put on their record.
  • Later in the timeline is Han’s daughter Jaina, who inherited her dad’s talent. She became a prominent member of Rogue Squadron herself.

• Airwolf:
  • Stringfellow Hawke is a helicopter ace several times over in the eponymous chopper, including:
    1. 4 Cuban MiG-19s in one go.
    2. Two WWII bombers, on separate occasions, the latter being missile armed.
    3. Another version of his own chopper.
    4. An experimental attack chopper, known as "HX-1".
    5. A Soviet Kalmar/"Delta III" class SSBN.
    6. A lot of MD 500 look-a-likes.
  • Dominic Santini almost certainly got more than five in World War II.
• Andromeda has Beka Valentine, who is rightly known as one of the best pilots in three galaxies. One episode has an entire fleet slaved to her flight controls in order to allow them to navigate a dangerous area of warped space with her skills and reflexes allowing most of the ships to make it through.
• Andor: Luthen proves himself to be quite deadly in a dogfight, making expert use of his tricked-out Fondor to down several attacking TIE Fighters while escaping an Imperial patrol with no backup.
• Howlin' Mad Murdock from The A-Team was most certainly one of these: he flew a small jet, a jumbo jet, a biplane, many small passenger planes, a jetpack, and untold numbers of helicopters over the course of the series. Other characters (especially the colonels and general chasing after the A-Team) acknowledged Murdock's mad skills. Whether he's a Steamroller, a Bushwhacker, or a Plugger depends on the episode. Given his craziness, it makes (relative) sense for him to be all three.
• Babylon 5:
  • Several of the main characters were portrayed as pilots of some skill. Sinclair, Sheridan, Ivanova, and Garibaldi all had Ace Custom starfuries featuring distinctive Nose Art. Marcus and Lennier both piloted White Stars through numerous battles. Londo Mollari bragged about being such a pilot, and on one occasion got to handily prove it in a shuttle dodging Anti-Air missiles like it was no big deal (he could be extra daring since he already knew how he would die and it wasn't for years). G'Kar led a patrol of Narn fighters to Z'Ha'Dum and was the only one to survive a battle with the Shadows. Even some of the villains qualified, such as Mr. Bester, who had his own elite telepath fighter squadron, the Black Omega Squadron, as his own pet project. Sinclair is openly stated to be one, having flown a starfury in various battles of the Earth-Minbari War and not only survived but killed a discrete number of Minbari fighters.
  • Executive Meddling forced J. Michael Straczynski to add one of these in the second season. He responded by having the pilot do nothing for almost the entire season and then killing him off at the season's end.
  • Meanwhile Ivanova got an Offscreen Moment of Awesome in this regard in "Believers", taking on something on the order of two dozen raider ships by herself in defense of a passenger liner. When she got back, she laughed it off to Garibaldi as an uneventful flight. Garibaldi remarked that her fighter would be in the shop for at least a week.
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003):
  • Kara "Starbuck" Thrace was played straight as the best pilot in the Fleet, with the kill count and retina-detaching moves to match (including locking the wings of her viper with Apollo's to bring him home when it lost power — in the middle of a battle!). Also, plenty of pilots will claim to be able to fly anything with wings. But how many of them could climb inside something's dead body and fly its brain?
  • Starbuck may be the Fleet's Top Gun, but Lee "Apollo" Adama is second only to her, even pulling off a few Starbuck-worthy moves in his own right when an injury puts her out of commission.
  • There was also an episode dealing with the Cylon ace, Scar, who's a Bushwacker/Sniper using his wingman as a decoy. Scar had one big difference from every other Ace on this page: he couldn't die, at least not permanently. He was resurrected and reloaded into fighter bodies countless times, until he seemingly had too much experience to be beaten at all. Sure, he had countless kills, but he himself was killed a significant number of times — and every time he died, he got angrier and angrier. Starbuck gets him by using his own tactic against him, luring him into position so her wingman Kat can shoot him down, and this time he doesn't come back on account of their having destroyed the Resurrection Ship earlier in the season.
• Most of Battlestar Galactica (1978) pilots were these: Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer, Jolly, Greenbean, Cree, Sheeba. If you weren't a Bridge Bunny, you were probably an ace pilot. Justified in that only the very best pilots survived the destruction of the fleet.

• Greg "Pappy" Boyington from Black Sheep Squadron, both on the show and in real-life was an ace pilot in World War II, having shot down between two to six Japanese planes while he was with the Flying Tigers and 22 more with the Marine Corps.
• In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Buck is one of these, performing dogfighting with 25th century spaceships, as most pilots in this era rely completely upon their combat computers.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Tenth Doctor takes over control of piloting the Titanic as well as the Vinvocci's spacecraft, and pilots both through perilous environments (one while it was on a high-speed collision course, and the other through several waves of missiles), despite having no experience in either vehicle before.
  • "Victory of the Daleks": Danny Boy is one of three pilots that fly Spitfires into space to assault the Dalek ship, and is the only one to survive.
  • "The Tsuranga Conundrum": General Cicero became a decorated war hero with her piloting skills. And although it's been a while since she's flown anything, she still retains those skills.
• Earth: Final Conflict has Captain Lili Marquette, formerly of the US Marine Corps. She's the one who developed the Unusual User Interface for the Taelon shuttles.
• In The Expanse, Alex is this for the Rocinante, the legitimately salvaged Martian gunship that the main heroes fly on. Alex is actually a fairly interesting case of playing with this trope: when piloting the Canterbury, a humble cargo transport ship, he seems like a damn good pilot, but he later explains that he was considered not good enough to make the grade in the Martian Navy and says that he was "a glorified bus driver" during his time in the Navy. The implication at the time is that he's something of a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond; amazing by the standards of a civilian transport pilot, but substandard in the eyes of the extremely badass Martian Navy. While he does do some leveling up during the course of the series, including one period where he trains obsessionally to improve his performance, it soon becomes clear that he legitimately qualifies for this trope and the Martian military badly underestimated his skills and potential. This is also why Alex is particularly attached to both the Roci and the crew, as having the chance to actually pilot a Martian gunship after spending twenty years getting passed over in the navy is essentially a case of My Greatest Second Chance for him.
  • After Alex's death from a brain aneurysm, James Holden shows some competency as a pilot too, although not nearly to Alex's extent. The final battle does have him fly around Ring space while dodging railgun shots, which requires some pretty good skills.
• Hoban Washburne of Firefly is a genius pilot who is said to be able to "thread a needle" with a Firefly-class freighter — and the skills he's shown backs it up. Because Serenity is completely unarmed (except for its destructive engine exhaust), Wash is restricted to playing as a plugger, with emphasis on outmaneuvering and evading his opponents instead of defeating them in a straightforward confrontation. It’s in the blood, too, as his daughter Emma shows her own skills in the comics.
• From the Earth to the Moon: The astronauts, naturally. Wally Schirra stands out among them as The Ace.
• Horrible Histories casts the WWII Royal Air Force as, um... a boy band.

• Lost: Frank Lapidus who arrives with the freighter crew in Season 4 is acknowledged in universe as being a fantastic pilot. He's introduced piloting a helicopter through a storm where it's struck by lightning. His passengers, who parachuted out, assume he must have crashed but he landed the chopper perfectly. He's later part of two crash landings (neither of which are his fault) with minimal casualties in the second and none in the first. In the series finale he's able to launch his plane despite it literally being held together with duct tape.
  Miles: Hey, hey, Lapidus, where's the chopper? Where did it crash?
  Lapidus: Crash? The hell kind of pilot do you think I am? I put her down safe and sound right over there!
• Madam Secretary: We only know Henry McCord's flying record via exposition to his son for a school project because he's retired by the time of the series. In an unusual variant, rather than being a Navy or Air Force air-to-air ace, he flew F-16s on ground attack missions for the Marine Corps in Operation Desert Storm and, in his own words, "I always hit my target."
• Mayday:
  • Subverted in the Tenerife disaster. See Real Life for more details.
  • A couple of other episodes on Eastern Flight 401 and United Flight 173 also show how having an ace pilot can be a liability instead of an asset. Flight crews are now trained to work together as a team, thanks to these accidents.
  • Played straight in the case of United Airlines Flight 232, in which the cockpit crew used CRM effectively and even employed the services of an off-duty instructor pilot who happened to be on board that day, and were able to minimize the severity of the crash, leading to a crash that killed 112 people rather than all 296 people on board.
  • Japan Airlines Flight 123 also played this straight, with the pilots keeping the crippled aircraft in the air for longer than anyone could in the flight simulation. Sadly only four people survived this crash, however this was mostly due to the incompetence of the search and rescue teams and not at all the fault of the pilots.
• The Orville has Lieutenant Gordon Malloy, the best pilot in the fleet, who got blacklisted for showing off to a girl, resulting in lots of cargo being lost. He's also famous for drawing penises on lots of places. But he's also manages to pull off a trick known as "hugging the donkey", which allows the Orville to evade a powerful Krill destroyer and then position the ship to receive an out-of-control shuttle, while in the middle of said firefight. In a later episode, his piloting skills are the only thing that allow Captain Mercer's daring plan to work against a Krill battlecruiser. Lieutenant John LaMarr is the ship's navigator but is also a highly-rated pilot himself, second only to Malloy. He gets to show off his skills in one episode (without even spilling his soda). Subverted with Pria Lavesque in "Pria", who appears to be able to fly the ''Orville' out of a dark matter thicket, but later reveals that she was just faking. The actual flying was done by a 29th-century device she has previously attached in engineering.
  Lt. Gordon Malloy: This is something I call "hugging the donkey".
  Lt. John LaMarr: You can "hug the donkey"?
  Lt. Gordon Malloy: Dude, I've been "hugging the donkey" since flight school.
  • When doing a test fight against a Moclan ship in "Deflectors", Ed had to ask him to dumb it down — the point of the test was to see how the improved Deflector Shields stand up to fire but the Moclans couldn't get in a single hit until that point.
  • During the Battle for Earth, Gordon is shown piloting a Krill fighter and casually taking out Kaylon ships several times the fighter's size, while quoting Top Gun. And that's after pulling two seemingly impossible maneuvers in a shuttle: successfully launching off a ship in FTL (normally suicide) and then pumping all of the shuttle's power into a single powerful burst of speed that should have cracked the shuttle like an egg.
  • In season 3, Gordon test flies a new fighter craft against a team of Attack Drones controlled by Charly Burke, who can think in multiple dimensions. He manages to outfly and blow up all the drones.
• Agent Dave Pomeroy, from the TV Movie Panic in the City, is a reserve pilot for the Coast Guard, and can fly a helicopter from a suburban area out to the coast on short notice, a handy skill for disposing of a nuke.
• The Alternate Rimmer in Red Dwarf is so much this trope that they even named him Ace. "Smoke me a Kipper...!"
• Space: Above and Beyond: The series revolves around USMC Do Anything Soldiers whose ostensible specialty is as fighter pilots, but the 58th Squadron's commanding officer Colonel T.C. McQueen, the Sole Survivor of the previous top squadron in the Corps, stands head and shoulders above them despite a Career-Ending Injury to his inner ear. After an enemy ace nicknamed Chiggy von Richthofen after the historical Red Baron kills several squadrons' worth of pilots including a 58 Red Shirt, McQueen has the surgical implant keeping his inner ear working removed and personally goes out to blow Chiggy von Richthofen out of space.
  Priest: In times of war we must all make peace with our maker.
  Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius "TC" McQueen: Well, I don't think our maker wants to hear from me right now. Because he know I'm going to go out in this plane and I'm going to remove one of His creations from His universe. And when I get back, I'm going to drink a bottle of scotch as if it was Chiggy Von Richtofen's blood and celebrate his death.
  Priest: Amen.
• Stargate:
  • Stargate Atlantis has John Sheppard as the quintessential Ace Pilot who can fly anything and isn't afraid of proving it. He is seen flying a helicopter, Puddlejumpers, F-302s and a Dart. And a hollow asteroid. And, once or twice, a city.
  • Jack O'Neill from Stargate SG-1 isn't so bad himself. Even though he transferred from fighters to special ops a long time ago, he hasn't lost his touch and gets to demonstrate it a couple times, most notably in the opening episode of Season 7 in which he needs to make a hyperspace microjump to place himself inside an enemy superweapon's shields, level out before crashing into the superweapon, and then take out the small thermal exhaust port, while dodging enemy fighters on the way in and out. He labels it "the wackiest plan we've ever come up with," then proceeds to execute it perfectly. Later on, he's the one giving a lecture to a roomful of F-302 pilots on the intricacies of flying the spacecraft.
• Star Trek
  • Star Trek: The Original Series has Mr. Sulu, who is such a hot pilot that he could jump into a 20th century helicopter and fly it expertly.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Commander Riker was stated (and briefly shown) to be the best pilot on board. (Mainly because he's the only pilot on board, or at least the only one capable of flying the Enterprise on manual. Riker's much-maligned joystick in Star Trek: Insurrection is actually a faster, more precise, and simpler way to control the ship than typing commands into the computer, or however the helmsman normally controls the ship).
    • Captain Picard is actually an extremely good pilot as well, although it's shown more subtly. He's been known to take the helm himself in situations where extremely precise maneuvering is needed to get the ship out of danger ("Booby Trap", "In Theory"), talked an inexperienced pilot through a difficult maneuver in order to avoid a crash ("Coming of Age"), and most notably developed the Picard Maneuver ("The Battle") which exploits the fact that a ship traveling at FTL velocities is invisible.
  • Star Trek: Voyager has Tom Paris, who had been flying since he was five years old. In his own words:
    Paris: Captain, asking me to give you a bumpy ride is like asking a virtuoso to sing off-key.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • Helmsmen Travis Mayweather is said to be an expert pilot having grown up on ships, although in the series, he does not get to use this talent on-screen much.
    • Captain Archer is also shown to be a highly skilled pilot, having been one of the test pilots for the early NX Program prototypes ("First Flight").
  • Star Trek: Discovery gives us Lieutenant Kayla Detmer, who's had a pilot license since she was 12. In a Season 2 episode, she ends up doing a "donut" in a starship in order to get a dark matter asteroid to drag an asteroid stream away from a planet. Michael Burnham herself is shown to be pretty good in the previous episode, when she navigates a dangerous Asteroid Thicket in a tiny one-person pod.
    • Also Christopher Pike, who was a test pilot before he was captain.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • Cristóbal Rios demonstrates his topnotch starship piloting skills during his David Versus Goliath battle with Kar Kantar.
    • Before they meet, Rios praises Seven of Nine as a magnificent pilot to his Emergency Tactical Hologram while she helps him fight off Kar Kantar.
    • Narek gives Rios a run for his money in the piloting department when their ships engage in a Space Battle around Coppelius. Narek could very well have obliterated La Sirena if Seven of Nine hadn't arrived with the Artifact, but their vessels are incapacitated by the Orchids before a winner can be determined.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has Erica Ortegas, whose flying skills are demonstrated multiple times in the early episodes alone, often by flying dangerously close to some dangerous astronomical phenomenon while dodging enemy fire. In "Among the Lotus Eaters", Ortegas loses her memories and doesn't know what to do while the ship is in an Asteroid Thicket and is being hit with small rocks. The computer reveals to her who she is and that she's the pilot. Her Survival Mantra becomes, "I'm Erica Ortegas. I fly the ship." She then proceeds to fly on instinct and procedural memory alone, managing to not only safely navigate between giant asteroids but also punches a hole in one with phasers and flies through it. And at the end of the episode (after already getting her memories back), she grabs an asteroid that's been lifted up by two shuttles with a tractor beam, then spins the ship around to hurl the rock away like she's a baseball pitcher.
• Jake Cutter from Tales of the Gold Monkey is one of the Plugger variety (considering his plane is an unarmed Grumman Goose flying boat, he's rather obligated to be). He is also a literal Ace, having five confirmed victories flying against the Japanese when he was with the Flying Tigers.

• The novelty song "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" actually has the facts correct (on the human half, anyway); Manfred von Richtofen really did rack up 80 well-documented confirmed victories (and another 20 or so suspected ones) before he was brought down.
• Iron Maiden's "Aces High" takes the viewpoint of an RAF pilot during the Battle of Britain.
• Sabaton basically made a song about the real-life badassery of Manfred von Richtofen (aka THE Red Baron,) such as the aforementioned 80 kills or how he was first enlisted in the cavalry.

• The player is this In Williams Electronics' F-14 Tomcat, a lone pilot pitted against General Yagov and his seven-fighter squadron.
• The Airborne Avenger is implied to be one.

• The Adventure Zone: Balance has Davenport.
• Jet Siquliak of The Penumbra Podcast. Doubles as a pun: he's both an Ace Pilot and an "ace" pilot.

• Ace of Aces was a game which simulated combat between two World War I biplanes using only two matching books, each filled with views of the opponent, seen from the cockpit of the player's plane. The players selected their next move, exchanged numbers and ended up on a new page showing the result. If a player choose badly, this could be a shot of incoming machine-gun fire.
• BattleTech has pilot skill ratings along with gunnery skills for marksmanship. The piloting skill is used for everything from preventing your 'Mech from overheating to jumping on top of your opponent's mech and crushing it beneath you. Pay enough Battle Value and you can get a very good pilot for your most expensive 'mech.
  • In-Universe-wise the Battletech setting has had multiple Ace Pilots, with each main timeline having at least one Famed in Story example. These include characters like Natasha "Black Widow" Kerensky, The Bounty Hunter, Kai-Allard Liao, Morgan Kell and his son Phelan Kell, Danai Liao-Centrella and Gray Noton.
• d20 Future's "Dogfighter" advanced class.
• Flying Circus is a game specifically about flying WWI-style biplanes with an extremely detailed plane creator as a mercenary company of absolute degenerates in a land of Germanic states after an apocalyptic version of WWI. The Masteries system as well lets you specialize in one of four styles of fighting that each map perfectly to one of the above styles.
  • Bushwack pilots are well, Bushwackers, sneaking up on foes to shoot them out of the air unaware
  • Dogfighters are Steamrollers, aggressively turnfighting and wearing down their opponents for the kill
  • Slipstream pilots are Pluggers, focusing on evading and defending until the enemy slips up
  • Sharpshooters are of course Snipers, focused on accurate long-range fire. The only Mastery gunners can take.
• A trait on offer to players in Rocket Age. For a more specific example look to Herr Aldritch Switzer, Nazi test pilot and scientist.
• The Star Wars d20 roleplaying game has always had some kind of Ace prestige class. The revised d20 edition had two: the Ace Pilot and the Jedi Ace. And since the Ace Pilot had 10 levels and the Jedi Ace had 5, the really dedicated Force-sensitive pilot character could max out both.
• In the Systems Malfunction tabletop game, the "Vehicle Expertise" and "Ace" perks allow characters to become ace pilots of the vehicle of their choice. In the LARP, the Pilot class allows characters to be ace pilots of Mini-Mecha and/or remote-piloted drones.
• The Warbirds RPG is focused on the player characters being mercenary fighter pilots in a setting where that role is analogous to "rock star who shoots people". Bluntly, if you're not a skilled pilot, you're probably an NPC. In the Guild, anyone with ten dogfighting kills is a "dogfight ace", while ten strafing kills is a "strafing ace"; there are certain plane upgrades you can only take if you've reached this status, and some require you to have fifty in one category (an "Elite Ace") — you get free plane upgrades as your killcount rises, although if it gets shot down you need to start over or drop a lot of money on getting your kite back up to scratch.
• Aeronautica Imperialis has pilot skill ratings used to determine the chances of a pilot pulling off an impossible maneuver (e.g. flying at '0' altitude, normally a crash for a non-ace pilot, and not dying). 'Ace' pilots (those who have scored five kills) have a better pilot skill rating (generally 3+ or 2+ instead of 4+ or 3+) and thus a better chance of not dying. And then you have the Nightwing squadron of four planes that shot down sixty six hostile fighters in one engagement. Technically impossible under the AI rules because a Nightwing has enough ammo to down only nine fighters before being forced to disengage (and you'd have to be really lucky to pull it off anyway), but possible using the Apocalypse rules.
  • In the main 40K game, you can buy Ork Dakkajet planes an ace pilot, known as a "Flyboss", who has survived more dogfights than he can count (i.e. six or more). This increases his Ballistic Skill rating when shooting at aircraft and skimmers to a princely 3, the same as the average human infantryman.
  • In the Rogue Trader RPG setting two of the options for a Voidmaster's special ability are ace pilots (either for large starships or space fighters). The Flight Marshal alternate career rank allows a Voidmaster to become even more of an Ace Pilot. Oddly enough, rules for fighter combat (as opposed to deploying entire squadrons) weren't added until much later.
  • One of countless mini-expansion articles for Inquisitor added Glavian pilots, drawing from Midas and Medea Betancore from Eisenhorn, who supplement natural piloting skill with cybernetics that add a solid +20 to piloting rolls, which is a hefty bonus even in a system where most dice rolls are percentile.
• In X-Wing Miniatures, virtually every single ship has at least one named pilot with unique or at least uncommon talents and a Pilot Skill of 7 or above — people like Luke Skywalker, Wes Janson, Corran Horn, Juno Eclipse and Boba Fett, have Pilot Skill 8. The Aces among Aces, however, are those with Pilot Skill 9. There are only nine characters with Pilot Skill 9: Darth Vader (TIE Advanced), Soontir Fel (TIE Interceptor), "Quickdraw" (TIE/SF), Han Solo (YT-1300 - and has two cards with different talents), Wedge Antilles (X-Wing), one version of Poe Dameron (T-70 X-Wing), Talonbane Cobra (Kihraxz Fighter), Dengar (Jumpmaster 5000), and Fenn Rau (Protectorate Starfighter). Amusingly enough, since Pilot Skill is used for Action Initiative, this means that unless he's up against one of the others mentioned, Han is virtually guaranteed to shoot first. In terms of the piloting styles, jouster lists lean towards Steamrollers to rip enemy ships apart as quickly as possible, arc-dodger lists favour Bushwhackers to evade enemy lines of fire and slowly wear down enemies who can't actually respond, and turret lists like big, durable Pluggers who can soak up arc-dodgers' low damage output and don't really care much about fire arcs. Most of the above aces are Steamrollers who specialise in dealing lots of damage quickly (Vader, Poe, Quickdraw, Dengar, Talonbane Cobra and Wedge); Han is a Plugger with some useful tricks first and foremost, Soontir is a Bushwhacker, and Fenn Rau can either fight like a Bushwhacker or Steamroller depending on how you fly him (although Bushwhacking with him tends to keep the pressure off his Glass Cannon ship).

• Ace Combat speaks for itself, with your main pilot shooting down hundreds of foes and destroying even more ground targets by the end of the game all on his own. You can be any type you want, depending on your plane and loadout. And in almost every game, you will have to face another top ace as the Final Boss.

• Ace Combat Zero: Cipher (player) VS every enemy ace of the game and later, Pixy. The Belkan War introduced its own ace style classification based on a simple Karma Meter: the Knight Ace only kills the targets he is ordered to kill, sparing the neutral ones (civilian facilities, damaged enemy planes, etc.), even though that brings him little in terms of cash; the Mercenary Ace kills everything he can get his sights locked on if he'll get paid for it, combatant or not; and the Soldier Ace finds a compromise between his conscience and material needs. Gameplay-wise, the Mercenary gets to buy better planes early on but has to face tougher enemy aces, while the Knight fights less aggressive enemies and is praised by both his allies and his enemies and the Soldier is inbetween. Some prime examples of Snipers would be Schnee Squadron, whose main tactics include electronic jamming and long-range Phoenix missiles. The Final Boss forces you to steamroll via Air Jousting because his plane's only weak points are the front air intakes. In a case of Mergingthe Branches, later lore implies that Cipher shot down ALL boss squadrons, the varying ones at the same time.

• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: Trigger (player) VS Mihaly Shilage. In an interesting take on the situation, while this is non-canon since the player can do what they want, Trigger mentally fits the steamroller archetype as subtle narration clues imply that he is rather gung-ho and eager to fight. Mihaly has both the skills and the plane to fit whatever archetype he needs to counter his current foe.

• In Ace Online (A.K.A. Air Rivals), players with enough PvP kills earn ranks and titles, one of which is "ace." All of the listed piloting styles exist in this game in some shape or form, although every player must utilize each of them for different situations and types of enemies.
• CO Eagle from the Advance Wars series, who commands strong air units that burn less fuel per day than those of other COs. This is at the expense of his comparatively weak grasp of naval combat, though his friend and colleague CO Drake can usually pick up his slack on that front.
  • Days of Ruin gave us two: the revenge-driven, offense-oriented Tasha, and the Smug Snake Waylon.
• Advance Wars Eternal War:
  • Jonathan. Played with, in that he also gets good land units, at the cost of poor naval units and infantry.
  • Robyn. Taken to extremes in that she loves staring at the sky, and hates pollution. (Small irony then that jets are frankly awful for the environment. They don't run on captured sunbeams.)
• Air Force Delta Strike's entire cast of pilots by the end of the game.
• The Ravens and LYNX from the Armored Core series.
• COD 2 Spanish Civil War Mod: Joaquín García Morato, the top-scoring Nationalist fighter ace, makes a brief appearance during one of the Nationalist missions when he shoots down an enemy fighter.
• You play as one in Cloud Cutter, with your titular vehicle being a state-of-the-art jet fighter equipped with a dazzling array of weapons, and you pilot it alone to take on hordes of enemies each stage.
• In Company of Heroes, Tiger ace Hauptmann Josef Schultz is a clear expy of Michael Wittman. In a later expansion, the player can take charge of Schultz's tank to do battle with the British 7th Armoured Division in the real-life Battle of Villiers Bocage.
• Crimson Skies had the main character Nathan Zachary, and his crew of Ace Air Pirates.
  Nathan Zachary: When you hit the ground, tell'em Nathan Zachary sent ya!
• In each of the Elite games from the original to Dangerous, the player is expected to become one by getting enough kills to reach the eponymous rank of Elite (and in Dangerous' case, doing it in exploration and trading as well).
  • The Fuel Rats, a player group devoted to refueling stranded players in Dangerous, has a reputation for being composed of skilled pilots capable of rescuing players extraordinarily quickly, even across the galaxy. This has come to a point that Frontier Developments has named the dominant player faction in the Fuelum system after them, as well as peppering the in-game advertising with ads for the Fuel Rats.

• Flying Red Barrel:
  • Marc, pilot of the titular Red Barrel
  • Peat, who pilots the Blue Crow;
  • Members of the Guild Sherry
  • Islay
  • Others.
• Far Cry 5 has both the player character and Nick Rye, who can provide you with support from the air using his modified crop duster Carmina
• Freelancer is crawling with them. Trent (your character), unsurprisingly is one of the best, out of everybody in the game. Literally, considering the premise of this game.
• Project Sylpheed, Freespace, various Star Wars games, face it, you WILL be playing as an ace pilot in any space shooter. In Freespace, you're not awarded an [[ce medal until you've scored sixty kills: if it were five, you could be an Ace after your first flight. Double- and Triple-Ace medals also exist for reaching 150 and 350 kills.
• The heroes of the Gradius series are experienced Gradius pilots who tackle Bacterian forces with the Vic Viper series, such as James Burton and his descendant, David Burton, who pilots the Vixen series instead in Nemesis III. The Salamander OVA has a trio of Gradius military pilots named Dan, Eddie Evans, and Stephanie McBain that aid Latis' battle against the Salamander forces. Even Latis' prince, Lord British, is also this trope himself, as he also helps the heroes take on the Bacterians with his own fighter.
• Trevor Philips of Grand Theft Auto V is the team's designated pilot, and he's really good at. Even being an amoral, insane drug addict in the present hasn't diminished his flying skills. He was actually on his way to being a military pilot before he flunked the psych exam.
• Noble Six of Halo: Reach is implied to be one even by Spartan standards, since the very reason s/he was transferred to NOBLE Team in the first place was because of his/her impressive piloting exploits during a counter-insurgency op on Mamore. The player gets to put those skills to use in the space dogfight section of the level "Long Night of Solace".
• Any named character from Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X..
• Henry Stickmin Series: Charles, for all his bumbling, is a god when he's in the cockpit. In the Triple Threat plotline of Completing The Mission, he's able to stop his chopper mid-flight so the rotor blades don't chop up Henry and Ellie as they leave the sabotaged rocket and so they don't hit the inside of the chopper at terminal velocity. This is an incredibly difficult maneuver to pull off, requiring precise timing and exact calculations of the trajectory and speed of all involved parties. And he pulls it off without a hitch.
• In Infinite Space, you'll find a few recruitables with ace piloting skills, and you'll notice how they can turn the tide of a battle when used right. Most notable of these come in Act 2 (Namely Mihhaelo Luka and Volo Naturo), since in Act 1, only Gadina has the skill while Johano Sceptro and Brava Soneto only have some close stats.
• The same goes for IL-2 Sturmovik. Most of the World War II aces are featured in the game, mainly via their Ace Custom planes.
• In Into the Breach, each unique mech pilot has a special skill to help them in gameplay. In addition, every pilot can level up to unlock two generic skills that increase the capabilities of their mechs.
• Jak from Jak and Daxter has vehicle skills that are top notch, and have been a core aspect of his character since [The Precursor Legacy.
• Kerbal Space Program, though most decidedly of the non-military variety, does give us Jebediah and Valentina Kerman. Both of them, as well as any other Kerbalnaut with a "Pilot" profession, are highly-trained masters of guiding spacecraft throughout the cosmos. Jeb and Val in particular have a hidden "BadS" flag set to true, meaning they never lose their cool, even when the craft is barrel rolling sideways into a cliff face at 300 miles an hour.
• Rean Schwarzer from The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel grows into one. His specialty is both a Steamroller and a Plugger.
• Mass Effect:
  • Jeff 'Joker' Moreau, although the player is almost never exposed to his competition. In the first game, he dives from orbit to drop an armoured vehicle on a landing strip 30 metres long and then pull up to escape back into orbit, while under continuous heavy fire, one one motion. The Normandy is not damaged. Oh, and the very minimum 'safe' landing zone to make a drop in, according to Alliance regulations? 100 metres. Joker is quite literally the best pilot in the Alliance. Notable in that his craft isn't a fighter like is common for the trope, but a 100+ meter frigate. And he still makes it do tricks that one would expect more from a fighter craft.
  Joker: It takes skill to bank in a vacuum. Don't think it doesn't.
  • Mass Effect 3 adds shuttle pilot Steve Cortez (who previously served as a fighter pilot in the Alliance Navy), who claims the UT-47A Kodiak flies like a brick, yet he still wins dogfights with Cerberus gunships flying one. In the Citadel DLC, a rogue mercenary gang steals the Normandy SR-2. While Shepard infiltrates the ship, Cortez has to prevent it from jumping to FTL by literally blocking it; repeatedly flying within a 30-degree cone of its line of travel will trip the jump safeties and keep the mercenaries from fleeing. It also exposes Cortez to the SR-2's formidable main weapons, so he has to continuously duck in and out of the line of fire, keeping up with the frigate's course changes and dodging skyscrapers. Cortez accomplishes this feat in a taxi.
  • In Mass Effect: Andromeda, turian Pathfinder and former Spectre Avitus Rix is a skilled fighter pilot which he demonstrates by dog-fighting kett forces during the final battle.
• If you want to get to the center of the Galaxy in No Man's Sky, you are expected to become one of these due to the enemies you fight becoming harder and harder to take down as you get closer to it.
• Red Alert 3: Although they don't do any piloting in-game, Commanders Giles Price and Vera Belova (and Zhanna Agonskaya before her) are noted to be aces who primarily use aircraft (but hardly limit themselves to that).
• Becoming one is your goal in Red Baron. Along the way, you may encounter other historical aces from World War I, including the Red Baron himself.
• The main protagonists from Sigma Star Saga are both Ace Pilots.
• Solatorobo: Red the Hunter has Chocolat, a thirteen-year-old girl who can fly circles around the best of them with a chunky airship that's more of a flying home base than a fighter plane.
• Tails from Sonic the Hedgehog. Depending on continuity, he either built or upgraded the Tornado, but no matter what after Sonic meets him he becomes its designated pilot, outflying robots and aces decades his senior through sheer skill.
• The entire Star Fox Team, of course... except maybe Slippy and Krystal.
  • Especially Falco. That's his thing. He's even slightly more competent in the actual gameplay.
  • The comics feature Fara Phoenix, a civilian pilot good enough to be permitted to fly military aircraft...then she went up against a Venomian Cruiser and had to bail.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • The character Atton Rand seems to be the token "ace pilot" character, particularly in terms of personality. However, under his control, the ships you travel in during the game seem to crash an uncanny number of times... Kreia and Bao-dur both comment on this as the game goes on. According to Atton, the only reason the lot of you are still standing is because he is a good enough pilot to land a half-exploded shuttle instead of slamming it nose-first into a hill.
  • In the first game, being an excellent pilot is Carth Onasi's Informed Ability. He at least only crashed once, and it was more like a controlled emergency landing after one of the Hawk's engines is blown out by the Star Forge's defenses. Between that, and getting safely off Taris during an orbital bombardment, Carth's on-screen record is better than poor Atton's.
• Chris Roberts' Strike Commander is all about Ace Pilots, specifically Private Military Contractors using F-16s and other jets to support various sides in various wars in a Crapsack World 20 Minutes into the Future. The game also keeps a Kill Tally painted on your plane, and tracks kills for all your teammates on a scoreboard in your base.
• Several of the Sunrider’s Ryder pilots might qualify, but Asaga Oakrun is the only one explicitly referred to as an Ace Pilot in-universe. She’s the Steamroller type, piloting a Ryder that is basically nothing but guns and a pair of swords, and can easily take on anything that comes her way.
  • Icari Isidolde is the Bushwhacker type, as her Ryder is a Fragile Speedster that excels at taking out enemy Ryders but can’t do much against ships. She relies on her overwhelming speed and stealth capabilities to get in, cut her target to pieces, and get out before their friends can retaliate.
  • Sola di Ryuvia is the Sniper type, and she has an actual sniper rifle as her weapon of choice. She can only make one shot per turn, but that one shot is usually strong enough to take out most mechs and seriously damage enemy capital ships if not destroy them outright.
  • Kryska Stares is the Plugger type, as her primary role in battle is to provoke enemies into attacking her slow and heavily-armoured Ryder instead of the more fragile members of your team. And since said Ryder is armed with battleship-grade weapons, she can give just as good as she gets.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation:
  • The Aggressors were the founders of mecha combat, and are still some of the best mecha pilots in the game. Also The Federation ran the School, an experiment in turning children into ace pilots — the only four to survive were Ouka, Seolla, Arado, and Latooni, also some of the best pilots in the game (though you only get Ouka for one level). Also anyone with a last name that ends in -stein (Branstein, Garstein). Which makes Elzam (a Branstein and an Aggressor) wicked awesome.
  • There's also the ATX team in which during the first game Kyosuke, Excellen and Bullet are at the same level if not surpassing the Aggressors to the point where Sanger Zonvolt (another Aggressor and arguably most badass in the OG verse so far) believes they have a better chance of beating the aliens than HE does.
  • In fact nearly everyone on your team is an Ace Pilot either by insane skill (ATX, Aggressors, Axel, Irm and Ring), developed Telekinesis abilities (Ryusei, Aya, Kusuha and company) or by being the only pilots capable of operating unique and extremely powerful machines (Masaki, Lune, Kouta, Folka etc). Really the reason the OG group is so unbeatable is because they have nearly every Ace in the EFA in one group.
  • Also, in many of the Super Robot Wars games, once a pilot racks up 50 or more kills in a playthrough, they're given the status of "Ace", which gives various advantages depending on the game and character, ranging from slightly higher starting morale (Which is necessary for unleashing their most powerful attacks) to all manner of dodge and damage bonuses. Super Robot Wars W takes this even further with W (pronounced Double) Ace status upon reaching 100 kills, and gives an even more dramatic bonus. Notably, the pilots who make Ace the most easily tend to be of the Plugger archetype, via either improbable evasion skills or the ability to soak up ridiculous amounts of damage, because players can simply send them into the thick of the enemy and let them rack up kill after kill when the enemies unwisely try to attack them.
• Asemu doesn't get Soul in Super Robot Wars BX but he gets the Super Pilot ability, which gives him a 20% damage boost.
  • While the usual standards for grabbing the ace bonuses apply, people consider Amuro to be the greatest pilot among X-Cross in-universe for Super Robot Wars X.
• Jake Logan from Tachyon: The Fringe. He's established as already being an experienced mercenary fighter pilot at the start of the game, creating a minor quandary as to how to frame the tutorial. The solution ended up being to have Logan evaluating a newly hired piloting instructor.
• Titanfall and Titanfall 2: Pilots, who control the titular Titans, are deadly both in their Titans and on foot.
  • Viper of the Apex Predators, with his coldly professional Boss Banter, ever-present flight helmet, and Ace Custom Northstar Titan, would almost be a parody of the trope if he wasn't so skilled and ruthless. He also takes the "Sniper" ace subtype more literally than most, as the Northstar-class Titan is the game's designated sniper Titan.
• Strangely, Ultima I, as part of the main plot, requires the player to launch into space and kill 20 enemy ships, thereby becoming a "Space Ace."
• Vector Thrust, being heavily based on Ace Combat, draws similarly from the glamour and glory of aerial combat. Its AI is also designed to closely resemble ace archetypes in Skirmish Battles.
• The Wing Commander series always has you play an ace pilot, and furthermore, features a group of different aces that you will fly with during missions, each of which has different temperaments and tactics in battle. Some games even put personalized Aces on the enemy side, each of which can generally be described as conforming to one of the types above.
• The Player Character in the X-Universe games. Getting the highest combat rank, "X-TREME", requires you to destroy tens of thousands of ships, and kills by your Player Mooks don't count.
• Likewise, you take on the role of an Ace Pilot in both the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, and proceed to kill hundreds upon hundreds of government employees doin' their jobs/the good guys. You dick. In the latter game, you become so respected within the Empire's ranks that Darth Vader himself requests your help.
• Player characters Leo Stenbuck from Zone of the Enders and Dingo Egret from the sequel The Second Runner. Notably, Leo is an ordinary kid who literally fell into the cockpit of the game's Super Prototype mecha Jehuty, but quickly turned out to have The Gift. Dingo, by contrast, is an embittered veteran ex-soldier forced back into action when he ends up wired into Jehuty's cockpit to survive. The two go head-to-head at one point in the second game, with a now older and more-experienced Leo proving to be almost a match for Dingo despite using a less-advanced mech than Jehuty.

• Four Seven Niner from Red vs. Blue is a Plugger, flying an apparently-unarmed Pelican. Has, to date on screen, done the following:
  • Hovered feet below and stood off from an oil rig-like structure.
  • Avoided fighter fire by flying through an ice canyon in one of the few justifiable examples of the latter trope.
  • Retrieved a package and two Freelancers in freefall. In a city. While the building they'd just jumped off of was collapsing next to them. UNDER FIRE.
  • Navigated an Asteroid Thicket while evading enemy fire, deploying a Freelancer team, and eventually saving the Mother of Invention from a tactical nuke while outracing the blast radius.
  • Performed a VTOL landing out of freefall from flight altitudes. In seconds. The maneuver was so delicate that she needed an AI to give her the countdown to deceleration burn with her reaction time factored in.

• Many of the characters in Angels 2200 are the character type, if not specifically 5-enemy-pilots-killed aces.
• Broch Landry from the comic Good Ship Chronicles is perhaps the greatest pilot alive, but also dangerously unstable and prone to snap necks at the slightest provocation.
• The Hark! A Vagrant strip about Billy Bishop (see also Real Life, below).
• Eddie in Jackie Rose. Despite his skittish nature, he can fly an airplane expertly to get through narrow crevices and even shot down three planes in a dogfight. This even goes all the way into his past when he managed to pull up a plane when it was nosediving when he was no more then 11 years at that point.
• The T-Girls of the Remix Comic Jet Dream. Harmony Thunder was (pre sex-change, as Jack Thunder) a literal Korean War ace.
• Captain Anzollo in Second Empire. He successfully evacuated his Emperor and his troops from the heavily defended Skaro, and later on he became one of the titular Second Empire's best pilots, taking the fight to the massed forces over Ziragalen and blunting the offensive before it had a chance to start. Even knowing he was going to die, he used Explosive Overclocking on his own engines to successfully disable a couple of dozen pursuing ships.
• Sally Skunk from Silent Sillies is one in the "Mavericks and Mummies" story.

• Zenna, Prince Samuel Race, Mac, Cabin, Rotor, Kara, and Larson from Dino Attack RPG.
• Stol, the longtime helmsman of the Enterprise-B from To Boldly Go... A Starfleet Quest.

• The Deep: Kaiko Nekton is the underwater equivalent of this. Will says she is greatest sub pilot alive and all the evidence supports this. In "The Dark Orca", she discovers she can roll the Aronnax: something no one thought was possible.

• Zap Monogan from Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist.
• Launchpad of DuckTales (Both the 1987 and 2017 versions) and Darkwing Duck fame is an excellent pilot capable of flying anything. Landing it, on the other hand... In the comics continuation of Darkwing Duck Launchpad even claimed he could fly the Ranger Plane in a Cutaway Gag. Gadget (not a bad pilot herself) disagreed (though she probably said it because Launchpad is too big for the Ranger Plane).

• Ellie the Ace has the title character, Ellie, and The Rival, Danny.
• Final Space: Sheryl Goodspeed calls herself the "best pilot in the universe". Hints at how good she is include her flying the Crimson Light out of Inner Space while the dimension is collapsing, and her lightfolding the ship through a Titan's skull while Gary and Quinn are on the ship's outside without them getting shredded.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): He-Man's mother, Queen Marlena, gets a chance to show off her skills in the original series episode The Rainbow Warrior.
• Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy been shown to be quite skilled as a commercial pilot, safely landing the damaged airline after it had been hijacked in the episode Passenger Fatty 7
• Captain Turanga Leela from Futurama is able to pilot the Planet Express ship through whatever wacky adventures the crew finds themselves in.
• In The Legend of Korra, both General Iroh and Asami Sato are shown to be amazing biplane pilots. Bonus points to General Iroh, who figures it out completely on the fly. Asami at least had six months to become an ace.
• Molly of Denali:
  • Molly's mom Layla is a bush pilot, and is complimented on her piloting throughout the podcast. She knows everything that’s going on in interior Alaska: what scientists are where and which ones always get into trouble, what the weather will be and if it’s dangerous to fly or not.
  • Trini's mom Joy is an Army helicopter pilot and very capably pilots a rescue mission to the top of Mount Denali in "Molly and the Great One."
• PAW Patrol:
  • The aptly named Ace Sorenson, a preteen pilot whom Skye idolizes. She is even shown teaching adults how to fly!
  • Skye herself is the Patrol's aerial rescue pup. She is among the most reliable and competent of the pups.
• Celery from Ready Jet Go!. She is great at piloting the flying saucer, avoiding asteroids and other threats with ease. In fact, Carrot mentions in "How Come the Moon Changes Shape?" that Celery has been voted the best driver (well, technically pilot, but the Bortronians tend to treat saucers like cars) in the Bortron system for three years in a row.
• Star Wars Rebels has Hera Syndulla, the captain of the Ghost. Racking up kills among TIEs is one thing, but she's also one of the very, very few people who have outflown Darth Vader. She also flew the prototype for the B-wing in both its initial test flight and its first combat mission.
• SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron:
  • T-Bone and Razor seem to favor a mix of Steamroller and Plugger styles. An example of an Ace with a back-seater — T-Bone's the pilot, Razor's the gunner/weapons officer.
  • The Red Lynx, being a Red-plica Baron, is naturally one of these. Even as a ghost piloting an old broken down biplane he is able to hold his own against the SWAT Kats and their Turbokat. The SWAT Kats only manage to shoot him down thanks to the sheer technological advantage the Turbokat has over the biplane. So when he hijacks the Enforcers' prototype fighter jet...
• Baloo from TaleSpin is a situational bushwhacker/plugger; in open sky, he bushwhacks like a mofo via ridiculous aerial acrobatics, in mountains and cities he plugs like a bastard through terrain manipulation, both supplemented by occasional usage of Abnormal Ammo — the only option available to him, as he takes on waves of fightercraft with a cargo plane. Unfortunately, he's about as business-savvy as the idiots who caused The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. Perpetual Poverty to the hilt, followed by a buy-out he wasn't even aware of until the new owner unlocked his door with her own set of keys.
• Voltron: Legendary Defender is full of characters who are excellent pilots, but special mention is given to Keith, who was a pilot prodigy and top of the class at the Garrison before being expelled due to disciplinary issues.
• Red Max, from Wacky Races, at least as an Informed Ability — his name is derived from the Red Baron and from Blue Max. By style, one can argue he's a bushwhacker.

Military Aces

Most of these are from the two World Wars, for obvious reasons. Some, however, are from the Arab–Israeli Conflict, the Korean War and The Vietnam War. We have yet to get an ace from the current century, as most current conflicts don't involve air combat. And the few that do involve air combat have been Curb Stomp Battles, where the winning side massively outnumbers the loser, leaving far too few kills to go around for anybody to become an ace. However, there is a tentative, as yet unconfirmed possibilty that there now is at least one ace. See the detail below.

• The Trope Namer was Frenchman Céléstin Adolphe Pégoud, the second pilot to perform a loop before World War 1. After he shot down his fifth German plane he was lauded in the French papers as an "ace", which at the time was a general term for someone who had done something heroic or noteworthy. British and American journalists who saw this then generalized that a pilot qualified as an "ace" if he shot down five planes. Pégoud himself racked up another air victory before being shot down himself in 1915.
• The most famous Real Life ace would be Rittmeister Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. He is the ace. In fact, he is usually referred to as the ace of aces, since ace simply wasn't enough (Richthofen was officially credited with 80 aircraft shot down, though he may have downed over 100). Richthofen was killed in 1918 (it's not definitively known who fired the kill shot, as it almost certainly came from the ground rather than from another plane). Considered a Worthy Opponent, the Allies gave him a full military funeral.
  
  Richthofen was a real-life example of the Sniper/Bushwhacker. According to his wingmen, his flying skills were not vastly superior, and he considered his aircraft merely a means to bring his guns to bear. At that point he would deploy his real skills: superb marksmanship and a gift for selecting targets which were not aware of him. At least, not until bullet holes appeared on their planes...
  
  He is perhaps best known for having taken the flamboyant step of painting his aircraft red, sacrificing the element of surprise for instant recognition from wing mates. Despite camouflage being the official rule for aircraft, it was permitted soon enough for other squadrons to have their machines painted with their own unique squadron colors.
• Manfred's younger brother, Lothar von Richthofen was also an ace pilot with 40 kills. He survived the war, became a commercial pilot and died in a crash in 1922.
  • Du bist Schläger, kein Jäger! (You are a brawler, not hunter!) — Manfred's ("brain" pilot) opinion of his little brother Lothar ("muscle" pilot)
  • Their cousin Wolfram von Richthofen also gained the Ace title with "only" 8 kills (having joined the Air Service much later than his cousins, the war ended only 7 months after Wolfram's first combat flight) and later served in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, where he raised to the rank of Field Marshal and the command of an entire air fleet.
• A very notable earlier one, of whom Richthofen was a pupil, was Oswald Boelcke.^note Richthofen, at the time an observer/gunner in a reconnaissance plane, met Boelcke by chance and was recruited by him for pilot training. Boelcke's biggest claim to fame is the Dicta Boelcke, the first manual of air-to-air combat and still relevant today. He was a mixture of a Steamroller and a Bushwhacker, the Dicta holds that a pilot should first seek to achieve surprise or attack from a superior position, then get into combat and stick with it until the other guy is flaming wreckage on the ground. Boelcke was killed in action in 1916.
• Ditto for Max Immelman, who was a contemporary of Boelcke, was the first pilot to be awarded the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest medal, (which was nicknamed the "Blue Max" in his honor during WWI) and was an inspiration to Richthofen. And having an aerobatic maneuver (in fact one of the basic ones) named after you doesn't hurt opinions, either. Immelman too was killed in action in 1916.
• The real life ace with the highest kill count was German Erich Hartmann ("Bubi" to his friends, "The Black Devil" to his enemies), with 352 victories credited. He felt his biggest achievement was never losing a wingman. Hartmann was the classic Bushwacker. He once described his own flying style as "Dive — Attack — Run Away — Coffee Break". He also stated that only damage his plane ever suffered in air combat was from destroyed enemy planes' debris. This was in large part because of his style of fighting: He would fly as close as possible before firing. He was known to have said "If you wait until the other plane fills the entire window of the cockpit, you don't waste a single round."
  
  There is a theory that he was able to achieve such a killcount only due to amphetamines — which were invented by Germans specially for the military pilots — due to him being on the front only for a relatively short time, but having a very tight schedule. His logs show as many as eight sorties on a certain day. While each sortie in WWII rarely lasted longer than a couple of hours, those planes didn't really have "power steering", and air combat is one of the most tiring activities known to man. Two sorties per day was the par for the course, three were somewhat tiring, four were a chore, five a burden and six nigh impossible. Eight sorties are widely considered achievable only by using stimulants.
  
  Hartmann fought on the Eastern Front, and attributed his number of victories to the fact that he was often tasked with interception of air-to-ground assault planes flown by novice pilots who were taught to stay in close formations and rarely if ever took evasive actions. See also the Japanese training philosophy explained below as Soviets shared this attitide. However, he also shot down seven U.S.A.A.F. planes engaged in bombing raids on the Romanian oil fields of Ploesti.
• Roald Dahl, better known as a bestselling author, was officially credited with 5 kills for England during World War II, but possibly scored more. One incident on his autobiography Going Solo describes an incident where he was cornered alone in his plane against six German bombers, with three crew each, making the encounter 1 vs. 18. With only three minutes before his engine overheated, Dahl managed to shoot down one of them and escape.
• Hans-Ulrich Rudel, possibly the most deadly man in an aircraft. He got the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds (an award ranked second only to the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross), the only man who got that. As the quote on the top of this page shows, he destroyed a total of 2,000 targets; including 800 vehicles, 519 tanks, 150 artillery pieces, 70 landing craft, nine aircraft, four armored trains, several bridges, a destroyer, a cruiser, and severely damaging the Soviet battleship Marat.
• Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe in Nazi Germany was an ace in World War I, with 22 victories. By the end of the war, he was commander of Jagdgeschwader 1, famous as the Red Baron's "Flying Circus" (he was apparently an unpopular commander, due to being rather arrogant even by fighter pilot standards), and mustered out as a Captain with a number of medals, including the famous Pour le Mérite. Had his career ended there, rather than having him go on to be a key player in developing Nazi Germany's war economy and Secret Police forces before becoming a drug-addicted General Failure during the Second World War, opinions of him today would undoubtedly be infinitely more positive.
• René Paul Fonck, Allied ace of aces in World War I and World War II. His 75 confirmed victories (just short of von Richthofen's count) exceeds the tallies of any allied WWI and WWII pilot, though he claimed up to 140. He was a combo Sniper/Bushwhacker, known to stalk a target before taking it down with a single short machine gun burst. In his own words: "I put my bullets into the target as if I placed them there by hand."
• The Soviet Union had the only real life female aces: Olga Yamshchikova (17 confirmed kills), Lidia Litvyak (12 confirmed, up to 20 rumored) and Katya Budanova (11 confirmed, up to 14 rumored). Litvyak and Budanova were killed in action, while Yamshchikova went to become the USSR's first female jet test pilot.
• Ilmari Juutilainen, 94 kills, the top Finnish Air Force ace, as well as the highest scoring non-German fighter pilot in WWII. 2 kills in a Fokker D.XXI, 36 kills in a Brewster Buffalo and 56 kills in a Messerschmitt Bf 109G. The first two were highly obsolete when he flew them, and the Brewster Buffalo was never known to be a good airplane at all...though the Finns managed to make them work. He served as an airplane mechanic as a conscript, and went to flight school only after his mandatory military service. He had extremely good both theoretical and practical knowledge on how airplanes behaved and what various plane models could and couldn't do. This was an asset in air combat as he could force the enemy to fight on his own terms. His best day was 30 June 1944 when he shot down six Soviet fighters on one flight. He flew actively after the war as well, and flew for the last time in the age of 83 (Finnish Air Force F-18 Hornet).
• Douglas Bader. 22 aircraft, with two false legs. Badass is an understatement..
• Alexei Maresyev, with 11 victories, also with two stump legs. Died on the day of a big memorial service in his honour just for spite.
• One British Hurricane pilot, James MacLachan made ace, then lost an arm to enemy fire. With a false arm, he did it again.
• Pekka Kokko, Finnish Air Force ace with 12 kills. Lost a leg in air combat and considered to be unfit for combat. What did the Finnish Air Force do? They made him a test pilot!
• There are many cases, mostly from World War II, of pilots making "ace in a day" (5 or more on a single sortie). That, for the Americans, usually meant a Medal of Honor. The recordholder was David McCampbell, a USN pilot at Leyte Gulf; nine confirmed and three probable kills in single sortie, a record that remains unequaled. He, however, was already an ace twice over. His wingman, Lt. Roy Rushing, scored 7 victories during the same sortie.
  
  One explanation of this comes from a flaw in the Japanese training system: they used The Spartan Way to produce a small supply of excellent pilots while the Americans used Bigger Is Better to produce ten times as many ''good' pilots. The Americans also rotated their experienced pilots home to act as Veteran Instructors to new pilots to give them the benefit of their experience while the Japanese pilots remained in combat to be killed off or become shell shocked veterans. Thus when the second crop of Japanese pilots came out after Midway they were less trained than their American adversaries, and there were very few skilled veterans still alive to mentor them. When the third crop came out during the attrition-heavy Solomon Islands campaigns, they were almost completely untrained in comparison to the Americans they were facing.
• Second highest scoring Finnish Air Force ace of WWII, Hans Wind (78 kills), scored "ace in a day" on five separate ocassions — and all within one month! The wingman of Captain Wind was SSgt Nils Katajainen (36 kills). On their last air battle 28 June 1944, they attacked twosome a Soviet air formation of 70+ aircraft and managed it to abandon the bombs. Amazingly, they both survived the feat.
• Randy "Duke" Cunningham was an American ace during The Vietnam War (the "hitting the brakes" maneuver from Top Gun was based on one of his tactics), being involved in some of the most known dogfights of that war. He was elected to Congress in 1991. In 2005, he was found guilty of corruption and served eight years in jail.
• Michael Wittmann was a German World War II tank ace, known as "The Black Baron". He got 138 tanks and 132 anti-tank guns, before being killed by the British Canadians either the British or the Canadians (it's disputed) in 1944.
  • It's important to note that German aces, especially Wittmann, had hilariously overinflated kill counts, as the Germans marked joint kills as full kills for all involved, marked probable kills as full kills, had a much lower barrier to recognize a kill (resulting in many German aces scoring more kills than there existed in the area according to Allied documents), and were typically assigned the kills for their entire unit in action.
• Kurt Knispel, another German, holds the World War II record, with 168 confirmed tank kills.
• Otto Carius, yet another German, who scored 202 vehicle kills (including some 60 softskins) on Tiger I, Tiger II and Jagdtiger. He was an pharmacist by his civilian profession. What did he do after WWII? Returned to home and set up a pharmacy store named Tiger-Apotheke!
• LaFayette G. Poole, nicknamed "Wardaddy" by his crew, an American tanker serving in France, accounted for over a thousand Germans KIA and a further 250 POW, and 258 German AFV kills, 12 of them being tanks. Al this took place in a time period of 81 days in 3 different tanks during 1944. And these aren't just kills claimed. These are the kills confirmed by German operational archives.
• Eddie Rickenbacker was the American Ace of Aces (most kills) in World War I. His autobiography is one long string of achievements, all told with a humble, "just the facts", style. Before the war, he had already gained fame as a race car driver. He spent the first part of his time in the Army as an airplane mechanic before managing to get a transfer into the Air Service.
• Richard Bong got that title for World War II, getting 40 confirmed kills before it was decided to pull him from the front line. He went into flying test aircraft and died on 6 August 1945. The following day, he shared some front pages with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Bong acknowledged that he was a poor shot, and compensated by aggressively charging in at full speed to shoot his targets up close. This resulted in frequently getting hit by debris from the fighters he destroyed, and one of his probable kills was a plane he collided with. His P-38 Lightning, being far more durable than any Japanese fighter, came out of this accidental ramming just fine.
  • It's generally accepted that Bong and his rival, Major Thomas Buchanan McGuire (38 confirmed kills), both shot down well over 40 aircraft, and that it's impossible to say who really had the higher score. McGuire died because he was so impatient to catch up with Bong that he took a significant risk during his last battle. About to be pulled from active service too (Bong had already returned to the States), he wanted to make the most of his final mission, so he didn't drop his external tanks before attacking a lone Japanese Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa fighter; this would enable him to continue on the flight and find more enemies to shoot down. Unfortunately, the Japanese pilot, Akira Sugimoto, was an ace himself with some 3,000 flight hours on Hayabusa, and McGuire, too low and encumbered by his drop tanks, crashed into the jungle.
• Billy Bishop was the second-highest-scorer for the entire British Empire in World War I. Started out as a Steamroller, then changed to a Bushwacker, which he found to be more effective. The Red Baron considered him the most skilled opponent he ever faced and the Germans called him the Hell's Handmaiden for his lethal effectiveness. He was a crack shot, having been a great marksman as a boy in rural Ontario, and was renowned for his keen eyesight. On the other hand, he was a sub-average pilot, crash-landing numerous planes. His official count is 72 victories, just behind the Red Baron for the entire war, yet there has been lingering controversy about whether he simply made up the details of a solo raid that won him the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth's highest military award.
• William Barker, another Canadian, is the most decorated serviceman in the history of the entire British Empire. Also won the Victoria Cross, after he was ambushed by 15 German planes, and fought them to a standstill, bringing down three of them before multiple wounds forced him to crash land directly behind Allied lines.
• Raymond Collishaw, another Canadian, (must be something in the water, eh?) credited with shooting down 60 aircraft in the First World War, mostly flying triplanes. He supposedly gave away even more kills to bolster the confidence of new pilots. The new pilot would shakily fire a few rounds at a German aircraft, Collishaw would sweep in and fire a quick, efficient burst, and down goes the German. Back on the ground, Collishaw claps the newbie on the back and congratulates him on his first kill.
• The highest British scorer, Edward "Mick" Mannock (73 kills), was also known for helping his wingmen in this way. He was said to have been blind in one eye, and is believed to have cheated on his pilot's exam. He was also known for his visceral hatred of Germans, and he vocally preferred to machine-gun downed pilots on the ground. He was killed in action in 1918.
• One of the most dangerous roles in WWI air-fighting was to shoot down observation balloons. These were protected by antiaircraft batteries and fighter patrols, and were also explosive as they were filled with hydrogen. Several pilots on both sides, however, gained reputations as balloon-busters. The most famous were Willy Coppens of Belgium (37 kills, including 34 balloons) and Frank Luke of the United States (18 kills, including 14 balloons). All Luke's kills were scored in a mere eight days of flying. Sadly, Luke's very aggressive solo style of flying likely contributed to his death after he attempted to down three balloons in a single sortie before being shot down. His chain of command had been preparing to officially reprimand him for his hotheadedness and lack of team player mindset (pilots who fought alone usually died alone at the hands of pilots who fought together), but instead decided to recommend him for the Medal of Honor after his death.
• Chuck Yeager — who was also the first man to break the sound barrier. Before he did that, his claim to fame was becoming an Ace in one day, and being among the first American pilots to shoot down a jet. He also scored two of his 11.5 official kills (he actually scored at least one more) by maneuvering two German pilots into a collision. Appropriately enough, his name is an Anglicized version of the German Jaeger ("Hunter"). As far as his style, he was a "steamroller" and a "sniper"; he could and did mix it up with the best of them, but also had almost superhuman eyesight that allowed him to hit at longer range with machine guns than most pilots could with cannons. The latter skill was how he took down a jet in his prop-driven P-51.
  • Like Ilmari Juutilainen did, Charles Yeager actively flew the P-51 Mustang in air shows into his 90s, as his WWII squadronmate Clarence "Bud" Anderson, a 16 victory ace, still does. They often flew together in formation.
• While we are on the subject of test pilots, Royal Navy Captain Eric "Winkle" Brown, is considered by many to be the greatest test pilot who ever lived. The first man to intentionally land a jet on an aircraft carrier, he logged 2,407 arrested carrier landings and flew 487 different types of aircraft, both records unlikely to ever be exceeded. He is one of the few pilots to fly every significant combat aircraft fielded by all combatants in WWII, Axis and Allied, including all of the operational German jets, and was the only allied test pilot to fly the practically suicidal Messerschmitt Me 163 rocket fighter under power. He even taught himself how to fly a helicopter with nothing more than a pilot's manual and a stiff drink when he was ordered to ferry one of the the Royal Aircraft Establishment's first Sikorsky R 4 B Hoverflys to Farborough. And to top it all off he wrote it all up in several books and dozens of magazine articles.
• Hanna Reitsch, "Die Hanna", could also qualify. She was the official test pilot of the Third Reich, and after the WWII she was very active on soaring, setting many world records. It is claimed only her gender prevented her becoming a "real" WWII fighter ace. Hanna Reitsch and Eric Brown knew each other well — they both had been introduced to aviation by WWI ace Ernst Udet.
• James Jabara, the first man to become a "jet ace", getting a total of fifteen kills in the Korean War to add to his one-and-a-half from World War II. Numbers five and six, of two MiG-15s were done with one drop tank stuck on his aircraft. He signed up for a tour in Vietnam in 1966, but was killed in a car crash before deploying.
• Saburo Sakai, the highest-scoring surviving ace of the Japanese Navy, had a career filled with moments that make him worthy of this trope. One was his 800-mile flight, in a damaged plane, a bullet hole through his head ^note He later underwent surgery on the affected eye to restore his vision...without anesthesia., which blinded one eye and paralyzed half of his body. Another was surviving a dogfight with sixteen American planes, better than his own, without a single bullet in his aircraft. And a third was the time a terrified enemy pilot bailed out before Sakai had even fired a shot. During that famed flight of survival, he was near to passing out several times, so he took to intentionally aggravating the pain in his wounds to jolt himself wider awake. Upon arriving at his base, he insisted on reporting to his superior officer before getting medical attention. After the war, Sakai became a devout pacifist, swearing that he would never kill anything again, not even an insect. In his autobiography he claimed his greatest achievement was not shooting down a Dutch airliner, even though it would have been an easy kill, because he saw women and children on board.
• Otto Kretschmer was a German WWII U-boat ace who sank 47 ships for a total of 274,333 tons before being captured by the British in March 1941 in an engagement that led to the death of Joachim Schepke, another ace. This was the most tonnage sunk by any U-Boat commander even though Kretchmer missed out on a significant portion of the Battle of the Atlantic. He survived the war.
• Günther Prien, another U-Boat ace, who was killed in 1941 attacking a convoy a week before Kretschmer's capture. Before that in 1939, he managed to get publicly praised by Winston Churchill after sneaking into the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow, sinking a battleship and getting back out before the British worked out what was going on. His closest counterpart in Royal Navy would have been Lieutenant Max Horton, who navigated his submarine to Constantinople harbour to sink a Ottoman Turkish battleship anchored there in WWI. He was promoted to Admiral in WWII.
• Otto Hersing commanded U 21, which on 5 September 1914 became the first German submarine to sink an enemy warship (the cruiser HMS Pathfinder). He went on to sink two British battleships, HMS Triumph and HMS Majestic, in the Dardanelles in 1916.
• Otto Weddigen, captain of U 9, sank three British armoured cruisers in 75 minutes on 22 September 1914. He went on to sink another one on 24 October, but died on 18 March 1915 when U 29 was sunk by being rammed by the battleship HMS Dreadnought.
• The submarine captain credited with sinking the largest enemy tonnage ever was Lothar von Arnauld de la Périère, scion of a Huguenot noble family driven from France by Louis XIV. During World War 1 he sank 194 allied ships totalling 454,000 tons. He was known for taking care to do his best to stop ships before sinking them in order to allow the crews to get into their lifeboats. The highest number of ships sunk was credited to Otto Steinbrink, but his 202 sinkings "only" totalled 232,000 tons.
• David Wanklyn of HM Submarine Upholder won the VC in the Mediterranean. Credited with 140,000 tons, he was the highest (confirmed) scorer on the Allied side.
• In the Pacific, USS Wahoo was commanded by "Mush" Morton. Known for his incredible aggression, he was the first sub commander to successfully sink a destroyer with a "down-the-throat" shot. Three of his officers went on to become successful skippers of their own, including Dick O'Kane.
• Dick O'Kane of USS Tang won the Medal of Honor for his last patrol — by ripping apart a Japanese convoy in a surface night attack, long after even Japanese escorts started carrying radar and making surface attacks incredibly hazardous. While Tang went down in that attack, she was sunk by her own torpedo — otherwise she would have escaped scot-free.
• Commander Jimmy Launders of the HMS Venturer holds the honorable distinction of being the first and only man ever to sink an enemy submarine while both his and the enemy's ship were submerged. Off the course of Norway on February 9th 1945, the Venturer detected U-864, which was known to have jet engines and V-2 parts destined for Japan onboard. A new vessel, U-864 was equipped with a snorkel allowing it to run submerged — a new feat for a submarine of the period. Realizing that the enemy would not surface and thus present him an easy target, Launders and his crew proceeded to do what was thought to be impossible: Mentally calculate a firing solution in four dimensions. Even with their almost impossible math skills, they still had to estimate the submarine's depth and make a Batman Gambit about its evasive maneuvres. This they did, firing half their torpedoes at the German sub. U-864 managed to evade three, but the fourth punctured its pressure hull and imploded it. Had she reached Japan, WWII may have been significantly longer.
• Luigi Rizzo, also known as The Sinker, was the closest thing Italian MAS (a speedboat with two torpedoes strapped on) Ace. Closest thing because he only sank two ships... Who just happened to be the coastal defence ship SMS Wien, that was being hunted down by the Italian Navy due the damage she was wrecking and was sank while in the supposed safety of Trieste's harbour, and the Austro-Hungarian flagship SMS Szent István, single-handedly ruining the Austro-Hungarian Navy final sortie. And the latter wasn't even on purpose: he was returning to his base after an uneventful patrol when he stumbled on the Szent István and her squadron (consisting of another battleship, a destroyer and six torpedo boats) sailing to join the rest of the Austro-Hungarian battleship fleet for a desperate attack on the Otranto Barrage, so he decided to fire torpedoes before running home to warn about the impending attack, sinking the flagship without the squadron realizing what had hit them and convincing the commander-in-chief Horty (with flag on the other flagship Viribus Unitis leading another squadron) the Italians were waiting for him. Rizzo also took part in the Bakar Mockery, a raid in a supposedly impenetrable harbor 80 km in a sheltered waterway named for the raiders leaving behind bottles containing mocking messages of challenge (to try and lure the Austro-Hungarians into an ambush), and the only reason he didn't sink anything is that, after the Wien, the admiralty had deployed torpedo nets against the protests of the ship captains, resulting in his torpedoes being blocked.
• Though it's not often remembered in the West (due to certain political disagreements in the intervening time) the highest-scoring Allied ace of World War II was in fact the Russian Ivan Kozhedub with 62 kills. In Soviet times there was a (officially suppressed, as the party line was that Soviet advisors didn't actually take part in combat) rumor that Kozhedub, despite the official orders to the contrary, actually flew combat missions in the Korean War, where he was a military advisor, and had another five victories there, becoming one of the very few two-war aces. It couldn't really be confirmed, though.
• It's widely believed that Kozhedub and the second best Allied ace of WWII, Alexander Pokryshkin (59 kills), have much higher real kill counts due to the way Soviet scoring system worked. Soviet pilots, ironically for a socialist country, received significant money bonuses for their victories, so to fight overclaiming and thus overspending, the confirmation rules were intentionally very strict, requiring, for example, the confirmation by the ground team, which automatically excluded any kills made behind the enemy lines, even if witnessed by other pilots. Pokryshkin also reportedly had many of his early kills not registered due to his bad relations with his superior officer.^note Bad enough that at one point his commander stripped him of his Communist Party membership card, effectively grounding him permanently, until his squadron-mates, with the help of their Political Officer, appealed to have the decision overturned. Pokryshkin also had the habit of "giving out" his victories to his wingmen and other younger pilots in his regiment in later years of WWII, as attested in their memoirs. It's thought that his real kill count is somewhere in the vicinity of ~120 victories. It should also be taken into account that unlike Hartmann with his "noob farming" tactics, the Soviets concentrated on fulfilling objectives and going for the head, that is, for the most skilled pilots, and Pokryshkin was widely described to be excellent at both.
• Giora Epstein. With a meager (compared to WWII aces) 17 confirmed kills holds the record for shot down jet planes and is the top ranking post-WWII ace. There is an old story about Giora being a part of the group escorting a certain United States senator / former fighter pilot around Israel. After a tour of the IAF museum the senator spent some time describing every single one of his 5 confirmed kills in detail before asking Giora himself whether he had anything to boast.
• John Thach is more a thinking ace pilot as a tactician, with only 8 air-combat kills, but who in World War II invented The "Thach Weave" which allowed US pilots to fight the technically superior Japanese Zeroes, even frustrating Saburo Sakai, and later the Big Blue Blanket that was an effective defense against the feared Kamikaze suicide attacks.
• Frank G. Tallman, the legendary Hollywood stunt pilot. He may have never flown in combat but no one can deny that he was one of the greatest ace pilots who ever lived. Amongst other things he flew a Beechcraft 18 through a steel framed billboard at 200 MPH with less than 24 inches of clearance for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and landed a Standard J1 biplane on two-inch caster wheels for The Great Waldo Pepper. Tallman did things with real airplanes that no one would dare do outside of CGI nowadays and his book Flying The Old Planes is considered a classic of aviation literature. Ironically, he died in a preventable accident, flying at low altitude in bad weather.
• Robin Olds wins the award for professional longevity first gaining 12 victories in World War 2 flying P-38s and P-51's in the European Theatre and then 20 years later he downed an additional 4 MiG's over Vietnam flying the F-4 Phantom. He retired in 1972 as a Badass General and during his Vietnam years he was known for an extravagantly waxed (and decidedly non-regulation) handlebar mustache. Indeed, to this day, American airmen honor General Olds' epic badassery by growing mustaches during Mustache March. Also, he has a fighter wing named in his honor: The 8th Fighter Wing, aka "The Wolfpack", from a Rousing Speech he gave before the battle^note In fact his calling them his "Wolfpack" was a callback to another unit in World War II that one of his commanding officers used to fly for where the wing, under his command, ambushed a dozen of the NVAF's newest MiG-21s and shot down seven of them... nearly half of North Vietnam's entire inventory of the advanced fighters. With no American casualties.
  
  Olds is on the record that once he scored his 4th kill in Vietnam, he deliberately avoided taking a 5th MiG because he was informed they'd drag him out of combat and put him on publicity tours once he became a two-war ace. He also missed out on the Korean War despite constant lobbying for a transfer to a combat squadron (any combat squadron)^note  He learned years later that his wife, a well-connected socialite, had pulled strings to ensure he was nowhere near the dangers of combat.. So if things had gone a little differently, it's very possible that Olds could have become the only three-war ace.
• Though not an aerial ace, scoring no recorded kills on aircraft, Major Charles Carpenter is still regarded as both a highly skilled pilot of the ultralight L-4 Grasshopper scout plane and a complete lunatic known as "The Mad Major." The reason for this was due to his frustration at not being able to fight the Germans directly... whereupon he had bazooka tubes mounted to his normally unarmed scout plane and began hunting German armored vehicles. And succeeding. Major Carpenter is officially credited with at least six armored car and Panzer kills, though unofficially his unit believed he'd knocked out several times that amount, included at least one operational kill against The Dreaded Tiger tank. Bazookas had an effective range of about 250 yards and Carpenter had no means by which to aim them, meaning that he had to get dangerously close to take a shot, eyeball most of his shots without even the courtesy of iron sights, then pull up and away before he embedded himself in the ground at high speed, making him one of the most unconventional and terrifying tankbusters known to man. And he did this all in 1944 in Europe, meaning he didn't even have a year to make a name for himself committing this mayhem. He lived to survive the war and return to being a history teacher.
• Nguyen Van Coc, highest scoring ace of The Vietnam War (counting both sides), had 9 kills under his belt. There were sixteen Vietnamese aces and two American ones^note  This was due in large part to the ridiculously unrealistic Rules of Engagement imposed on American fighter pilots by their government, of which the NVAF were well aware and only too happy to exploit.
• Before the production of You Only Live Twice, the James Bond producers, as well as the film's director and some crew members visited Japan to scout for locations. Director Lewis Gilbert got terrified when the helicopter pilot said "Me kamikaze pilot!". But the man's flying was good enough for him to be hired by the film's production. And when two helicopters had a small on-air collision (which severed the foot of a cameraman), the kamikaze managed to land the damaged chopper on a really irregular terrain! (the film also features a lesser example in K.H. Wallis, the inventor of Little Nellie who did some truly risky landing-takeoffs piloting it)
• Richard Candelaria, an American World War II pilot who happened to fly a P-51D Mustang on April 7, 1945. He gets separated from his squadron and forms up on the bombers they were to be escorting ahead of the rest of his squadron just in time to fight off 15 Luftwaffe in Bf 109 fighters, including one German ace, and two more in Me 262 jet fighters alone. This man defeated the jets, possibly shooting down one, shot down the German ace in a one-on-one dogfight, and took out three other planes before the rest of his squadron arrived on scene, at which point the rest of the Germans bugged out. And you, too, can witness his feat thanks to modern science and an interview with the man himself. [1] His tale starts at 8:00 and continues into part 4 and 5. This sounds very like the final mission of the flight simulator Blazing Angels, suggesting they took his tale and made it into a video game.
• Louis E. Curdes was one of the few pilots (see below) to shoot down planes from four powers in World War II. In the Mediterranean, he shot down seven German planes and one Italian plane before being shot down and taken prisoner. He escaped and evaded capture for eight months before making it to Allied lines. He was later transferred to the Pacific where he shot down a Japanese plane (One of only three pilots to shoot down planes from all three Axis powers.). THEN he shot down an American plane which was about to land in Japanese territory, forcing it to ditch. He is the only American pilot to earn a medal for shooting down an American plane. To top it off, his future wife was on that plane. [2]
  
  Saburo Sakai and probably a few other Japanese pilots shot down planes from five different powers — Chinese, British, Dutch, Australian and American. This probably also goes for quite a few German pilots (some of whom had already shot down enemy aircraft in the Spanish Civil War), since Germany was engaged in war against several smaller powers in succession and simultaneously. For instance, in the North African theatre of operations the Luftwaffe faced not just the British, but also the Australian, South African, Free French and U.S. air forces. Meanwhile on the Eastern front, the Soviets were facing the air forces of Germany, Italy and various smaller powers allied to the Axis.
• Hans-Joachim "Jochen" Marseille aka the "Star of Africa", while not exactly the most famous German ace of World War II, was exactly what you'd expect an ace pilot to be — a total womanizer and party guy with not much respect for authority. He was transfered to the North African theater in order to get him away from French women. While in the Battle of Britain he had not been notably successful, in North Africa he became virtually unstoppable. He would charge his plane straight into large British formations, then use high deflection shots to shoot the cockpit of his foes (at such an angle, you can't even see the plane your shooting at due to the engine). He racked up 158 confirmed kills, which all were against Western Allies, all but seven in North Africa. On 1 September 1942 he shot down 10 fighters that can be verified on RAF records. Erich Hartmann said that he thought Marseille was the best shot of any fighter pilot. He was killed when he tried to bail out of his Bf 109G after the engine failed and he hit the vertical stabilizer.
• Second-highest on the list of top-scoring German "Experten" against Western Allies with 102 credited air victories was Adolf Galland, known to R.A.F. pilots as "the Fighting Fob". Like Marseille, he came from a French Huguenot family. He started flying in the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War and finished the Second World War as commanding officer of the major German jet-fighter unit, the JV 44. Known for his love of cigars (there was a special holder in the cockpit) and for the Mickey Mouse emblem on his planes.
  
  A note must be made here regarding the JV 44. Formed partly as a Uriah Gambit and partly as an Antarctic reassignment for Galland, who was a vocal critic of Goring and the policies and tactics of Luftwaffe high command, this unit became the greatest gathering of airfighting talent ever assembled in any military force on the face of the Earth, with all its pilots easily qualifying as aces — if not triple aces — before they joined the unit. Many pilots recruited into the outfit had more than a hundred planes downed to their credit; the five top scoring pilots of the unit downed more than a thousand planes combined over their flying careers.^note Gerhard Barkhorn (301), Heinrich Bär (220), Walter Krupinski (197), Johannes Steinhoff (176), and Günther Lützow (110), totaling into 1004 aircraft downed; Lützow's score includes five kills made in the Spanish Civil War. Of these men, Bär (German for "bear") had the highest score in a jet, downing 16 planes with the Me 262. Steinhoff downed 6, Krupinski and Lützow both downed 2, and Barkhorn, who had trouble adjusting to the jet, downed none. Equipped with the Messerschmitt Me 262, these men mainly participated in defensive missions, attacking Allied bomber formations. Thankfully for the Allies, no more than six of the unit's planes were operational at any given time, and the war ended just two months after the unit's formation. Many of the pilots went on to become high-ranking officers in the postwar West German Air Force, aided by the fact that very few fighter pilots and even fewer aces of the Luftwaffe were ardent Nazis to begin with. Given the nature of modern aerial warfare, no such assembly of aces would likely ever exist again.
• Francis "Gabby" Gabreski scored 28 kills in World War II and another 6.5 in Korea, putting him half a kill short of being a septuple ace and making him one of the few two-war aces. He was famous (or infamous) for a flying style that was aggressive to the point of recklessness, often ripping into enemy formations before his wingmen had any chance to join the fight. His hyper-aggressive style made him controversial among his various wingmen; some thought he didn't care about fighting as a team and only wanted more kills for himself, while others loved the way he flew and tried to emulate his fast, hard-hitting tactics. This recklessness very nearly killed him on his final mission of World War II, a flight that wasn't even supposed to happen. He was scheduled to be flown home after having flown the standard maximum number of combat hours, but managed to convince somebody to let him fly "one more mission" escorting bombers into Germany. During a strafing run, he flew too low and clipped his propeller, and after he crashed he spent the rest of the war in a German POW camp.
  
  Gabreski also happens to have been a Polish-American who spoke fluent Polish. Before the United States Army Air Forces were fully up to operational status in Europe, he managed to talk British authorities into letting him fly with the Free Polish Air Force (which was then under British operational control) so that he could gain combat experience before his unit entered operations.
• While they don't shoot anyone down or engage in dogfights, bush pilots are by the definition of their job often required to be crazy-skilled aviators. Operating in harsh environments like the Australian Outback and the Canadian wilderness, a single pilot can be expected to do anything from shipping cargo, transporting people and acting as a flying ambulance. They have a reputation on the whole as being slightly touched in the head but great pilots who you can count on to have your back. Famous examples include Clennell "Punch" Dickens Rusty Blakey and the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia.
• Almost 90 Czechoslovakian pilots flew in the Battle of Britain and served in several RAF units. Karel Kuttelwascher had 18 confirmed kills (plus 2 for fights in France). The top Czech scorer in the Battle of Britain was Sgt. Josef František, flying with Polish Fighter Squadron who claimed 17 confirmed kills, which made him the highest scoring Allied pilot in the Battle of Britain. Other Czechoslovakian flying aces were Alois Vašátko, František Peřina, Otto Smik, Josef Stehlík, Miloslav Mansfeld, Leopold Šrom, Václav Cukr, Otmar Kučera and Tomáš Vybíral. The RAF's 303 Squadron was manned mostly by Polish pilots, plus Josef Frantisek, and despite arriving late they managed to be the top-scoring fighter outfit in the Battle of Britain, making them a squadron of Ace Pilots.
• Bob Hoover, regarded as one of the greatest pilots to have ever lived. Upon receiving the new P-38 Lightning, his first action he took in it was to shut off one of the engines at low altitude, and proceed to perform aerobatics, for which he was barred from flying a P-38 ever again. He was shot down over enemy lines in a Spitfire Mk V, then taken prisoner, only to later break out of prison, and fly a Fw-190 to the Netherlands.
• When flying in target-rich environment or the Last Stand, almost any pilot who can survive long enough, will become an ace. The Battle of Malta produced more RAF aces than any other single campaign, top scorer being George "Screwball" Beurling with 27 kills.^note Beurling was a mix of bushwhacker and sniper; while his nearly superhuman eyesight and excellent understanding of trajectories allowed him down enemy fighters by shooting where they're going to be from long enough range that his gun camera wouldn't even catch the kill (since by the time the rounds hit his plane was pointed in a different direction), he preferred getting behind the enemy and downing them point-blank because he felt he could use fewer bullet per kill that way. To aid in the bushwhacking, he had all tracer rounds removed from his ammo so that enemies would have no visual cue that he was shooting at them. Likewise, the top scoring RAF pilot, Marmaduke Thomas Pattle, scored the majority of his 50 kills during the Battle of Crete.
  • Pattle was the high scorer of both Gloster Gladiator (15) and Hawker Hurricane (35). Only 6 of his victories cannot be cross-checked on existing Italian or German records. He 25 of his victories in twenty days before his death in air combat over Eleusis Bay.
• John Boyd, father of the F-15 and F-16 and the Energy-Maneuverability Theory, and the man who literally wrote the book on flying fighters, was himself a pretty hot pilot back in the 1950s. Though he never scored a kill (he was too young to enlist in World War II, he flew an F-86 in Korea but didn't serve a full tour of duty, and was assigned as a base commander in Vietnam), he made a name for himself as "Forty-Second Boyd," so named because of a challenge he issued to pilots in training. If a pilot could last forty seconds in a mock dogfight against him, he'd pay the pilot $40. No one ever pulled it off. And let's emphasize that he did this in an F-100, a capable plane but also so unforgiving that it was known for a 25% fatality rate in training.
• Edward "Butch" O'Hare, the namesake for O'Hare International Airport in Chicago (they even have an F4F Wildcat in front in his honor). He became the American navy's first ace of World War II by shooting down five enemy bombers in a single day (a feat which also earned him the Medal of Honor), and he was the one who proved that the F6F Hellcat marked the end of Japanese fighter superiority at Marcus Island, for which he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He also helped the navy develop its night defense tactics, and according to a former wingman, always taught his pilots little tips and tricks to improve their flying. Unfortunately, though, he was lost in the navy's first night defense flight — he was caught in the crossfire between a Japanese G4M "Betty" and a TBF Avenger, and his Hellcat dipped out of formation and into the darkness. Neither he nor his fighter were ever found.
• Any reasonably competent pilot with a dash of aggressiveness and enough tactical savvy can score aerial victories in a plane designed for dogfighting. A very talented few (Rudel, Vejtasa) can score victories in a dive bomber. Adrian "Warby" Warburton of the RAF scored five aerial victories while flying a Martin Maryland, a type of MEDIUM BOMBER with forward-firing machine guns.
• Jalil Zandi, an Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcat (yes, that F-14 Tomcat) pilot was credited with 11 aerial victories during the Iran-Iraq War.
• Maj. Greg "Pappy"^note Although he was never actually called that by his pilots. Instead they called him "Gramps." Boyington. Short, tough, pugnacious, possessing of no brain-mouth filter, and ugly. He first saw combat with the famed Flying Tigers in China, where he quickly butted heads with Claire Chennault on tactics. Boyington had a great advantage over many other pilots in his sheer physical strength, allowing himself to haul his plane through blackout-inducing maneuvers by raw force of will that would leave his wingmen and opponents passing out. He was also known to pick the most battered, beat-up, and decrepit-looking aircraft on the flight line^note unlike the Army Air Forces, the Navy and Marines didn't assign aircraft to individual pilots. Instead, pilots would fly whichever plane happened to be available. In fact many Marine squadrons in the South Pacific shared from a pool of aircraft operated by all squadrons at that base. to instill confidence in the pilots under his command. During his time in China he was credited with two aerial victories and 1.5 aircraft destroyed on the ground (Boyington claimed six air victories). After the US entered the war, Boyington returned to the United States Marine Corps. Arriving in the Pacific, he cobbled together a squadron from unassigned pilots under the designation VMF-214. Originally dubbed "Boyington's Bastards," they were eventually immortalized as the legendary (and more media-friendly) Black Sheep.^note Contrary to the Black Sheep Squadron series, the name does not come from them being a gang of screw-ups with one foot in the brig. Boyington certainly qualified, but the name simply comes from how they were organized from pilots sitting around with no other assignments. Flying F4U Corsairs in combat against the Japanese, Boyington claimed a total of 28 aerial victories (he's officially credited with 26) by the time he was shot down and captured in 1944, tying Rickenbaker as America's Ace of Aces (eventually surprassed). Throughout his active service, Boyington was in a heated competition with fellow Marine pilot Joe Foss (himself a legend to the Corps for his actions during the grueling Battle of Guadalcanal as part of the Cactus Air Force) to break Rickenbaker's record. The press, looking for a morale boost for Americans growing weary of the slogging war of attrition in the Pacific, ate Boyington's antics up, with such publicity stunts as sending the Black Sheep a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap for every Japanese plane shot down. This lead to an iconic publicity photo◊ of the squadron standing on the wings of a Corsair with caps and bats. Both Boyington and Foss ultimately ended with 26 credited victories, however Foss is awarded the title of the Marine Corp's Ace of Aces since two of Boyington's victories came with the Flying Tigers. Boyington is almost as famous for his personality and being perhaps the Trope Codifier for the two-fisted, hard-chariging, brash and belligerent Marine as he was for his piloting.
• Royce Williams was a US Navy pilot on patrol during the Korean War when he and his wingman were attacked by seven Soviet — not North Korean or Chinese — MiG-15 fighters. Flying a F9F Panther, a plane not really suited for dogfighting, Williams shot down four of the enemy before the rest were scared off. Williams' own plane was shot up badly during the engagement, but he then made a miraculous landing back on his home carrier despite limited maneuverability and needing to come in at nearly twice the necessary airspeed. Despite how much of a morale booster the story would have been, the US government buried the incident as deeply as it could for fear that it would bring escalate the proxy war being fought and bring the US and Soviet Union into direct conflict. It wasn't until 2002 that Williams could start sharing his story and a movement got underway to get him the proper recognition.
• The (possible) first Ace of the 21st Century came about of February 24, 2022, at the start of the Russian-Ukranian War. More on it here. An unnamed pilot of a Ukrainian MiG 29 reportedly shot down 6 Russian planes in the skies over Kyiv on the opening day of the war, making him an Ace in a Day and gaining the nom de guerre of "The Ghost of Kyiv''. Later identified as possibly Major Stepan Tarabalka, who was reported shot down and killed on March 13, 2022, with (likely exaggerated) 40 kills. Even half would make him the highest scoring jet-era ace.
  • Ukraine's fighter pilots are facing larger numbers on a regular basis,^note In an interview, one pilot mentioned going up with 3 planes to face 24 opposing jets., meaning aces are likely to result eventually, similar to the situation in Malta in World war II.

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Civilian Examples

Civilian examples are pilots who, through training, skill, and capability, have saved multiple lives either on their planes or on the ground, or both. As mentioned above, technically they don't fit the military definition of an ace because they saved lives rather than took them, but that takes nothing away from their skill — in fact, that some of these pilots accomplished maneuvers that their craft should not be capable of, under conditions like complete engine failure and complete hydraulic system failure and power failure makes them even more the trope.

• The entire crew of the Apollo 13 mission: specifically Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, Gene Kranz, and John Aaron. Surviving multiple life support system failures in space, jury-rigging a system to keep themselves alive, and managing a successful return landing with all aboard surviving.
• The crew of Gemini VIII, Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, survived a thruster malfunction (that nearly caused both to black out) and emergency abort, landing safely after only 10 hours in space. It was Armstrong's coolness-under-fire that got him picked to lead Apollo 11 on the first moon landing.
• Eric Moody and Roger Greaves of British Airways Flight 9.: A cloud of volcanic ash had stalled all of the engines, flaming out one. Both kept the plane in the air anyway and it eventually landed safely, with no loss of life. Bonus points go to Moody for managing to remain calm under pressure:
  Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.
• Bob Pearson of the Gimli Glider flight: the flight ran out of fuel due to an imperial/metric unit mix-up before reaching its destination, causing all engines and all electrical power to fail. Pearson operated the jet as if it was a glider to make the emergency landing at a disused airport, saving the lives of all onboard, none of whom were even seriously injured. Not to mention that all other pilots crashed the plane when they were put in simulation of the event.
• Subverted tragically with the Tenerife disaster. Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, pilot of the KLM 747 involved in the crash, was the airline's most experienced and decorated pilot, and was regarded with such esteem that he served as KLM's spokesman and appeared in all of KLM's print adverts. It was this preceding reputation — as well as the fact that he was the pilot who had certified his first officer on the Tenerife flight — that probably factored into the crew's reluctance to stop him from impatiently taking off from the crowded, foggy airport without ATC clearance. This resulted in the destruction of two jumbo jets, the loss of 500+ lives, and the worst aviation disaster in history. In fact, when KLM found out that one of their jets was involved in the crash, they tried to contact Veldhuyzen van Zanten to have him clean up the PR mess, not realizing that he was the pilot involved in the crash.
• Although they were unable to save the plane, the crew of Japan Airlines Flight 123 certainly deserve mention. Because without any prior training, and under the effects of hypoxia, and with no hydraulic controls, they managed to keep their stricken 747 in the air for over thirty minutes before the plane slammed into a mountain, killing all but four of the 524 on board.^note There were more who survived the initial crash, who would have pulled through had rescue crews been able to get to the mountain sooner What makes it more remarkable, is that in simulations after the accident, not a single simulator pilot was able to replicate the exact results and control the aircraft for anywhere near as long, while having the benefit of knowing beforehand what they were simulating, and having a clear head to do it.
  • The legacy of the accident would live on however when the crew of United Airlines Flight 232 found themselves in a very similar situation. By pure chance, however, a United Airlines instructor and check pilot^note a guy who flies along side newly certified pilots or pilots up for re-certification to make sure they're doing their job correctly was headed home to Chicago and happened to have chosen that particular flight to get him there. The instructor, Dennis Fitch, had actually studied the JAL 123 disaster carefully, and up until then had been trying to figure out how to make the DC-10 controllable with just engine power alone. His persistence almost paid off entirely when the aircraft suffered a catastrophic mechanical failure of the fan blade in its tail engine, and lost its hydraulic system, rendering the flight controls useless. By alternating throttle inputs, Fitch was able to assist pilot Alfred C. Haynes, first officer William Records, and second officer Dudley Dvorak with regaining some control over the plane's speed, altitude, and steering. The pilots were able to get the plane away from populated areas, notify emergency services, and try their best to land — and while 111 people did die in the resulting crash, 185 survived what could only be described as impossible odds due to these pilots — and without any ground casualties. Ironically, the crash also restored faith in the DC-10, which up until then, had been seen as a flying death trap following two major accidents, the second of which grounded the fleet for months.
• Ed Reyes and Jaime Herrera, the pilots of Philippine Airlines Flight 434. Their Boeing 747 lost its flight controls after Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef set off a bomb in the passenger cabin (as part of a trial run for a larger plot to bomb several international flights). Reyes and Herrera used the same steer-by-throttle method as Haynes and Fitch. The pilots eventually brought the aircraft down safely in Okinawa. Several passengers were injured by the blast, but the only fatality was a man who had the bad luck to be seated directly above the bomb.
• US Airways Flight 1549, called the "Miracle On The Hudson," with only 3 major injuries and no deaths when, due to sudden loss of power from a bird strike, there was no choice left but to ditch in the Hudson River. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger, who successfully glided the plane to a floating stop while avoiding river traffic, is the most well-known, but the entire crew of Flight 1549 was later awarded the Master's Medal of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. The airplane was then put on permanent display in the Carolinas Aviation Museum at Charlotte International Airport, where it is the centerpiece exhibit.
• 21 years before the Miracle on the Hudson TACA Flight 110 was on final approach to New Orleans airport when the plane's engines flamed out due to excessive water ingestion. Unable to restart them and with insufficient height to make it to an airport, the pilot, Carlos Dardano, prepared to ditch in one of the canals surrounding New Orleans. Then, at the last minute, the flight crew noticed a grass levee running alongside the canal, made the split-second decision to land there, managed to reposition the plane to align it with the levee, and pulled off a near-textbook landing. Not only was no one seriously injured, but the plane itself was in good enough condition that with only a single engine replacement^note the damaged engine being the cause of the crash, rather than the result of it, the NTSB was able to fly it off the levee and to a nearby airport for further inspection and repairs. The aircraft was later returned to service. Oh, and Captain Dardano only had one eye- which he lost when caught in the middle of a firefight between guerilla forces and the El Salvador military. The incident occurred while the young pilot was transporting some important passengers on what was essentially a chartered flight. They had landed where the passengers were supposed to arrive, but the passengers' security wasn't there. One, a small child, needed to, ahem, relieve themself. While that was being taken care of, Captain Dardano noticed some guerillas. Just as the child was finishing, one of the snipers attempted to kill Captain Dardano, who only escaped death by moving at just the right moment. With blood gushing out of his face, Captain Dardano ordered the passengers back into the plane, and took off again. He flew the stunned passengers back to base, then managed to land safely with no eye and blood everywhere. Detailed here about ten minutes in.
• The unnamed pilot of Delta Flight DL431/DL302 out of San Juan, Puerto Rico to New York City, On September 5, 2017. It landed in San Juan at 11:58 am and took off less than an hour later at 12:43 pm. This sounds routine, but at the time, Hurricane Irma was lashing the Island. The plane was flying in the relatively narrow gap of calm air between the outer band and the core of the second most powerful hurricane in the history of the Atlantic Basin. It maintained itself in the narrow band of calm air for over 400 miles.
  • This was actually entirely planned by everyone at Delta from the pilot, the ground crew, and dispatch office and corporate headquarters, all needed for the fast turn around. And proven when Delta did it again before Hurricane Maria just a week later.