Who is the world's best fighter pilot?

Answer 1

The best pilot of the globe is recognized to be an Indian from the North Eastern Indian Air force deployment. He is recognized to have the fastest reaction time to external stimuli. He was credited the title by the USAF during a joint Indo-US exercise. Later in a joint exercise with the Russia, they too credited the same pilot with the title.

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Measured by the traditional standard, air-to-air kills, it is extremely hard to quantify who is best. Air-to-air combat in the last two decades is extremely rare; when it does happen, it rarely occurs between equals. Instead, it almost always pits a high-tech plane against one at least a full generation older, which is hardly conducive to a fair contest for determining the quality of the pilot. For instance, less than a dozen Iraqi aircraft were shot down by Coallition forces in the Iraq War - virtually all Iraqi aircraft either were destroyed on the ground or fled the country to Iran. There have been scattered Indian-Pakistani aerial contests, but none producing hard kills. The Falklands War is probably the last time even relatively equal air forces fought, and that was almost 30 years ago.

In fact, it is likely that the last jet fighter aces retired from their respective militaries in the 1990s, as the 1970s were the last time sufficient amounts of air-to-air combat happened anywhere.

Remember, the best fighter pilot is a result of a combination of factors: natural talent, excellent training, a quality aircraft, a high degree of familiarity with the aircraft being flown, and critically, combat experience to cement all the previous factors together. Without significant amounts of combat experience to sort out the exceptional from the merely very good, it is impossible to name a "best".