page_title: Fighter aircraft
section_title: Rocket-powered fighters
hierarchical_section_title: Fighter aircraft / Rocket-powered fighters
caption_attribution_description: Taken and donated by User:Guinnog Me-163 at East Fortune
context_page_description: A fighter aircraft, often referred to simply as a fighter, is a military fixed-wing aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat against other aircraft. The key performance features of a fighter include not only its firepower but also its high speed and maneuverability relative to the target aircraft.
  The fighter's main tactical purpose is to establish air superiority over the battlefield. The success or failure of a combatant's efforts to gain air superiority hinges on several factors including the skill of its pilots, the tactical soundness of its doctrine for deploying its fighters, and the numbers and performance of those fighters.
  Many fighters have secondary capabilities such as ground attack and some types, such as fighter-bombers, are designed from the outset for dual roles. Other fighter designs are highly specialized while still filling the main air superiority role, these include the interceptor, heavy fighter, and night fighter.
context_section_description: The first rocket-powered aircraft was the Lippisch Ente, which made a successful maiden flight in March 1928. The only pure rocket aircraft ever mass-produced was the Messerschmitt Me 163B Komet in 1944, one of several German World War II projects aimed at developing high speed, point-defense aircraft. Later variants of the Me 262 (C-1a and C-2b) were also fitted with "mixed-power" jet/rocket powerplants, while earlier models were fitted with rocket boosters, but were not mass-produced with these modifications.
  The USSR experimented with a rocket-powered interceptor in the years immediately following World War II, the Mikoyan-Gurevich I-270. Only two were built.
  In the 1950s, the British developed mixed-power jet designs employing both rocket and jet engines to cover the performance gap that existed in turbojet designs. The rocket was the main engine for delivering the speed and height required for high-speed interception of high-level bombers and the turbojet gave increased fuel economy in other parts of flight, most notably to ensure the aircraft was able to make a powered landing rather than risking an unpredictable gliding return.
  The Saunders-Roe SR.53 was a successful design, and was planned for production when economics forced the British to curtail most aircraft programs in the late 1950s. Furthermore, rapid advancements in jet engine technology rendered mixed-power aircraft designs like Saunders-Roe's SR.53 (and the following SR.177) obsolete. The American Republic XF-91 Thunderceptor –the first U.S. fighter to exceed Mach 1 in level flight– met a similar fate for the same reason, and no hybrid rocket-and-jet-engine fighter design has ever been placed into service.
  The only operational implementation of mixed propulsion was Rocket-Assisted Take Off (RATO), a system rarely used in fighters, such as with the zero-length launch, RATO-based takeoff scheme from special launch platforms, tested out by both the United States and the Soviet Union, and made obsolete with advancements in surface-to-air missile technology.
caption: The Messerschmitt Me 163 was the fastest aircraft of WWII
exif: {}