Top 25 Planes Of All Time

It's a fair question, and it's one we've spent a great deal of time discussing before we even embarked upon the journey. At first glance, the exercise seems a bit silly. After all, planes come in so many different shapes and sizes, with an equal number of mission types to match. How could you possibly choose just one? 

But the more we thought about it, the more sense it made to us. To start with, we needed to acknowledge that there are a lot of great airplanes. There are also a lot of historically significant airplanes, which is a more exclusive club, we decided. But finally, there is a level of greatness that you can indeed measure using a few distinct and, in most cases, at least somewhat quantifiable categories, such as how many were built or what its top speed is or how long it was in service. 

But looking at the different kinds of mission types, i.e., training, personal transportation, commercial transportation, fighters, bombers, reconnaissance and more, we decided to narrow things down even more by asking ourselves if there were a top dog among those planes. 

Surprisingly, the answer to that question was often an unequivocal, "Yes!" That surprised us to no end, but the more we reflected upon it, the more we knew it was true. 

So without further ado, we proudly present our list of the Top 25 Planes of All Time. Enjoy! 

Say what you will about it: It costs a boatload of dough, $350 million a pop, all up. It was late. It was way over budget, and some say in today's global political world, we don't even need it. But from a pure design perspective, the F-22 is the all-around most capable airplane ever, and by a good margin. The F-22 is the only full-up fifth-generation air-superiority fighter in the world that's in full production and that's fielded. And besides, it's better than the others, anyway. The F-22 is capable of a supercruise (that is, sustained faster than the speed-of -sound flight without afterburner) of Mach 1.85; it's incredibly maneuverable---the first time we saw a slow flight demonstration, we were absolutely spellbound, as this plane is capable doing things that look aerodynamically impossible; it features stealth technology; and, with a range of 1,600 nm without long-range tanks, it can go a long ways between refuelings.

The first jumbo jet has gone through a half-dozen versions in its 50-year history. Boeing has turned out more than 1,500 of the enormous jets, which are one of the largest aircraft ever built and one of the most successful aircraft, period. The original 747 was a revelation---huge, fast, sophisticated and democratizing---and it has only continued to get better and better over its half-century-plus lifespan. The 747 remains in production, though Boeing is focusing on building freighter versions of it now, as twin-engine aircraft such as the Boeing 777 with huge turbofan engines rule the skies. Many think of the 747 as a lumbering giant---it's anything but. With a cruise speed north of Mach .85, it's one of the fastest commercial transport jets. The latest 747, the 747-8, typically carries 467 passengers.

The Cirrus Aircraft SR22 isn't the most numerous single-engine personally flown aircraft---several others, including Cessna's remarkable 172, have numbers that dwarf the 7,000-plus SR22s that Cirrus has turned out since the plane's introduction in 2001. A four-seater---new ones have room for a fifth occupant to squeeze into the back row---the Cirrus SR22 is the ultimate expression of the personally flown piston single. Fast, supremely comfortable, sophisticated to beat the band, and oh-so-pretty on the ramp, the SR22 tapped into a market for such a plane. It is revered for its approach, fixed landing gear for a high-performance single, big seating area, advanced technology and, oh yeah, a whole-airplane recovery parachute system, which Cirrus dubbed CAPS (for Cirrus Airframe Parachute System), that will lower the entire plane to the ground, passengers and all, safely in one piece. While the original SR22 was positioned for a wide audience, the company soon found that it costs a lot to build airplanes and that every option it offered was being gobbled up. The resultant steady price rise has seen the SR22 go from less than $300,000 to nearly a million dollars over its almost 20-year history, which hasn't affected its popularity. It remains the best-selling single-engine aircraft of the last 20 years and one of the best-selling ever.

What in the world is this plane doing on this list? The DC-3, a radial-engine-toting, taildragging, mud-bellied, heavy-hauling twin designed in the mid-1930s surely doesn't belong on a list alongside supersonics and space planes, does it? It does. Launched as a domestic airliner in the days when piston engines were a clearer choice than turboprops for the important reason that turboprops didn't yet exist, the Douglas DC-3, with its seating for up to 32 passengers, immediately earned a lot of business from the fledgling U.S. airline industry. And when World War II started heating up, Douglas went into overdrive, producing around 10,000 DC-3s for the war effort---in all, the company cranked out more than 16,000 of the aircraft, which were known as the Gooney Bird, Dakota and C-47 (the latter among numerous other military designations). The Soviet Union built almost 5,000 of them under license, and even Imperial Japan cranked out nearly 500 DC-3 clones. In addition to its passenger-carrying pedigree, the DC-3 has been a parachute jump plane, an agricultural sprayer, a freighter and an executive transport. As of the turn of the century, there were nearly 500 DC-3s still in commercial use in dozens of countries around the world.

The inclusion of Concorde on our list of amazing planes will be among the least controversial. Anytime the goal is to do the impossible and you pull it off, well, that deserves recognition. But when you look at what Concorde did to become the world's only supersonic commercial passenger-carrying aircraft, it's even more impressive. And it's remarkable the plane made it into production at all, that the team, composed of British and French groups (itself noteworthy for its degree of difficulty) overcame huge aerodynamic, regulatory, legal, environmental, human-factor and commercial hurdles to build a Mach 2.02 commercial airliner. Was it a commercial success? Hardly. It was subsidized throughout its service life because, with its combination of limited available routings (since it couldn't overfly land at supersonic speeds), low passenger capacity (a maximum of 128 passengers, though most carried closer to 100), too-loud engines and very high fuel usage, it wasn't a winning commercial or environmental proposition. Its technical achievements, however, are mind-blowing, such as anti-skid brakes, a droop nose for better visibility when landing, full-time autothrottle and autopilot, fly-by-wire flight controls and in-flight fuel distribution to combat CG changes in flight. All that, and it's one of the most beautiful airplanes ever built.

Before you get started, this is not a nostalgia pick. The Piper Cub is a much-beloved airplane, one that many of us associate with a bucolic image of aviation in simpler times. And it is that. But it's also one of the most revolutionary airplanes in history and one of the most important. When C.G. Taylor designed the first Cub in the late 1920s, he was trying to do what many others were attempting at the same time: to build an affordable, easy-to-fly personal aircraft that would be useful for a wide variety of trips. Other attempts to design such a plane failed. Some, like Aeronca's C-3, nicknamed the "flying bathtub," were ungainly, underpowered and uncomfortable. With his "Cub," Taylor hit upon a magic recipe that resonated with customers. But it was the Depression, so the Cub might never have become the icon it is without the intervention a few years into its life of William T. Piper, who bought the company and updated the plane to that imperfect thing of beauty we know as the Piper J-3 Cub. The Cub has issues: The pilot in command, both when solo or with two aboard, sits in the rear of the two tandem seats, and getting into and back out of the thing was and is a young person's exercise. The Cub's flying manners are more than a little kite-like, and visibility while taxiing is limited. But somehow these liabilities were nothing compared to the overall joy of the J-3 because once you're in a Cub, and especially once you're flying it, it's the epitome of the joy and beauty of bare-bones flying. That's why, for 85 years now, the icon of personal flying is as beloved as ever. But that's not all. As a plane that an ordinary person could buy, learn to fly and keep in good shape on a shoestring, the Cub gave rise to what we now know as personal aviation. It wasn't long before the J-3 was supplanted by improved Pipers and a host of competitors, some of which got faster and more sophisticated, and the whole thing evolved into a segment of aviation that is for all the people, one that, in our view, is one of the crown jewels of America. And all of that can be traced back directly to the Piper Cub.

To those who might argue that this is more a spaceship than a plane, we'd counter, true! But the fact is, it was both a plane and a spaceship. If Concorde's designers set out to do the impossible, the Space Shuttle's creators were on a mission to do the impossible-er, to build and field a spaceship that could serve as a launch vehicle, orbiting space station and re-entry vehicle, all in one. The idea was really a simple one, to make a reusable space vehicle, so you didn't have to build an enormously expensive and time-consuming one for every launch. There were 135 missions, one of which, Challenger, was a launch failure that killed seven, and one was a re-entry failure, in which the craft broke up when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere. It is a huge aircraft, too, capable of transporting payloads of 60,000 pounds to low Earth orbit and 35,000 pounds to the International Space Station. The airplane part was extraordinary. After it reentered the Earth's atmosphere, the Shuttle would be a really fast glider, its pilots trained to bring that big craft back to a nose-high landing, no go-arounds available, and they nailed it every single time.

It's impossible not to include on this list one of the fastest and highest-flying planes of all time, though there were two things about it that we weren't crazy about: It didn't take off by itself, and it was a glider for most of its trip. The North American X-15, as was the case for the Bell X-1, which was the first supersonic airplane, was launched by a mother ship. The X-15's boost was courtesy of a Boeing B-52 specially outfitted to carry the X-15 aloft. But apart from that, this thing is mind-bogglingly awesome. It holds the record for the fastest aircraft---in fact, it holds all 199 top spots. In climb, it was faster than the next-fastest plane ever, the SR71, was in level flight. It was also the highest-flying plane ever, with a ceiling of better than 350,000 feet. Several of its dozen pilots earned astronaut wings for their flights. After the X-15 ran out of fuel, it became, like the Space Shuttle, a really bad glider. Landings were made on Rogers Dry Lake on skids at about 200 mph. Its pilots call the X-15 the most challenging and rewarding plane they ever flew.

The test of time is a good way to judge success, and in a marketplace like aviation, utility and reliability go a long way toward keeping customers satisfied and budgets in the black. The C-130 Hercules, a medium transport built by Lockheed-Martin (just Lockheed for much of its production life) is just such a plane. The big, four-engine transport is not only rugged and reliable, but it's also highly convertible, so it can play several different roles, from search and rescue to troop hauling to cargo transport to surveillance and more. The plane is one of the longest-serving military planes in U.S. history and has the longest military production history of any plane, not just in the United States but also in the world. The C-130 first flew in 1954, and it has stayed in continuous operation since then, in part because it was the lucky recipient of a design suite mated to a technology new at the time, the turbine-powered propeller engine, referred to as the turboprop, that was not only perfect for the C-130 but also became better and better suited for it over time as turboprop power and fuel efficiency improved. A big, strong, highly reconfigurable platform with a lot of uses, the C-130 was ready for the growth. It has, in fact, been upgraded several times; in all, there have been 12 editions of C-130, some of them special mission models, and several dash-number-specific upgrade programs have been implemented as well. In all, Lockheed-Martin has built more than 2,500 C-130s.

Developed in a secret government program by the great Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Skunk Works fame, the SR-71 is the fastest air-breathing airplane ever. With a top speed of better than Mach 3, it is also the fastest piloted airplane ever of any kind that could take off on its own. The idea behind the SR-71 is incredibly ambitious: to build the world's fastest, highest-flying operational aircraft ever, and all in the Cold War pursuit of keeping an eye on the Soviets. The SR-71 made its first flight in 1964, and over time Lockheed built 32 of them. Despite the improvement in Soviet missile defenses, the Blackbird kept on earning its keep, flying for more than 30 years before being retired for good in 1998, its jobs having been taken over by a combination of drones and satellites. But what an amazing plane it was!

--- When it comes to that last one, the one and only champion of the world is the Antonov AN-225 Mriya (Ukrainian for "dream"). By wingspan, tail height and length, it's the biggest airplane in the world. It is inarguably the biggest load hauler. The humongous Antonov holds the record for the biggest load carried, 545,000 pounds, and its listed payload is nearly twice that of the Boeing 747-800 and nearly four times that of the Airbus A380. How many copies of the cargo plane are there? Just one. Built in 1988 to carry the Russian Buran space shuttle, it has since flown as a commercial cargo carrier, its dual claims to fame being the ability to carry very heavy and very large loads while having sufficient space to carry larger loads than other plane in the world. The AN-225 is powered by six turbofans outputting more than 50,000 pounds of thrust apiece. They clearly get the job done.

One of the most-produced planes of all time, the 182/Skylane is arguably the most utilitarian affordable personal plane ever. Featuring a much more powerful engine than its Skyhawk predecessor, the 182 was faster, had more range, carried four in better comfort, and featured all the easy flyability of the Skyhawk. And it's still in production today. It was, in fact, one of only three planes that Cessna chose to bring back after its decade-long hiatus. It proved the perfect step-up plane for owners upgrading from the entry-level 172, which is nothing less than the most-produced plane of all time, giving pilots more of everything but demanding little in return.

This American fighter helped turn the tide of World War II by escorting Allied bombers deep into German territory, where it proved a formidable foe for Luftwaffe fighters. It's also one of the most beautiful planes ever. And it was far from just range that made the P-51 a special plane. It was among the fastest, most maneuverable and well-armed fighter planes up to that point in aviation history, a combination that made it remarkably capable while also making every Allied plane it flew beside safer and, hence, more capable, as well. There are other very important fighter planes from World War II, including the Messerschmitt Me-209, the Supermarine Spitfire, the Goodyear/Vought-Chance Corsair, the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero and the Soviet IL-2 Sturmavik. But the Mustang seems the perfect combination of speed, agility, grace and power, and its impact on the overall war effort is arguably unmatched.

The Bonanza is one of a few truly revolutionary light personal transportation planes, and it is, in our view, the first truly modern personal plane, period. When it was introduced in 1947, just two years after the war, it was in a class of one. It was the most practical, fast, affordable and easy-flying four-seater ever, and Beechcraft's competitors hurried to keep from being left completely behind. Eventually, Cessna would introduce a true competitor, in the form of the Model 210 Centurion, but with its big head start and a strong edge in terms of aesthetics, the Bonanza was a decade or more ahead of the competition. And Beech engineers continued to find ways to make the Bonanza better, faster and stronger, eventually coming up with a conventional-tail hangar-mate, the Model 33 Debonair and a straight tailed stretch version, the B-36, which continues in production today.

The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II was used in frontline combat duty in the United States for 36 years. The Mach 2.2 screamer was a fighter, an interceptor, a bomber and an electronic surveillance platform that could launch from land or from sea. Over the plane's production life from 1960 to 1981, McDonnell Douglas churned out more than 5,000 F-4s. The jet is perhaps best known for its service during the Vietnam War, during which it served as a ground attack, electronic surveillance and air superiority fighter, fielded by the Air Force, Navy and Marines. The Phantom, interestingly, is the only plane that was used by both the USAF Thunderbirds and the USN Blue Angels.

Do you want more great airplane lists? Take a look at "10 Cheapest Planes In The Sky," "10 (More) Cheapest Planes In The Sky," and "8 Great Used Planes."