The 20 Most Famous Pilots in History, Ranked by How Many People Look Them Up

The most famous pilot in history, measured by how many people actually go looking for them, is Howard Hughes. Over the 12 months to August 2026, his English Wikipedia article drew 1,917,886 human readers, narrowly ahead of Amelia Earhart at 1,831,818.

Most “famous pilots” lists are one writer’s opinion. This one ranks 20 aviators by a number anyone can check: a full year of English Wikipedia pageviews, bots excluded, from September 1, 2025 to August 31, 2026.

The Wright brothers come third and Charles Lindbergh fourth. The biggest surprise sits at number five: Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the airline captain who put an Airbus in the Hudson, now draws more readers than the Red Baron.

Rank	Pilot	Famous for	Readers, 12 months
1	Howard Hughes	Speed records, the H-4 Hercules	1,917,886
2	Amelia Earhart	1932 solo Atlantic crossing, 1937 disappearance	1,831,818
3	Wright brothers	First powered, controlled flights, 1903	948,006
4	Charles Lindbergh	First solo nonstop Atlantic crossing, 1927	905,640
5	Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger	US Airways 1549 Hudson ditching, 2009	746,970
6	Manfred von Richthofen	The Red Baron, 80 credited victories	675,572
7	Chuck Yeager	First verified supersonic flight, 1947	398,603
8	Antoine de Saint-Exupéry	Airmail pilot and author, lost in 1944	354,041
9	Francis Gary Powers	U-2 shot down over the USSR, 1960	342,298
10	Jimmy Doolittle	Blind flight, the 1942 Tokyo raid	291,369
11	Paul Tibbets	Piloted the Enola Gay, 1945	280,765
12	Erich Hartmann	352 claimed victories	280,699
13	Bessie Coleman	First African American woman licensed, 1921	234,790
14	Douglas Bader	Legless Battle of Britain leader	196,224
15	Hans-Ulrich Rudel	Stuka pilot, 2,530 claimed missions	186,573
16	Robin Olds	Operation Bolo, Vietnam, 1967	178,540
17	Gregory “Pappy” Boyington	Black Sheep Squadron commander	171,349
18	Richard Bong	Top American ace, 40 victories	154,431
19	Hanna Reitsch	Test pilot, first woman to fly a helicopter	153,920
20	Eddie Rickenbacker	Top American ace of World War I	153,417

Two notes on scope. This is a list of aviators, not of celebrities who happen to fly; actors and musicians with licences have their own ranking in our celebrity pilots list.

And fame is not skill. Eight of these 20 were combat aces, but if you want the aces ranked by what they did in the air, that is a different question, answered in our list of the best fighter pilots in history.

1. Howard Hughes

Hughes tops the list partly because he was famous for so much besides flying. But the flying was real, and some of it set world records.

On September 13, 1935, he flew his own H-1 racer to a world landplane speed record of 352 mph (567 km/h) over a timed course near Santa Ana, California. The flight ended with a wheels-up landing in a beet field after the fuel ran out.

In January 1937, the same H-1 crossed the United States in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds, averaging 332 mph (535 km/h). In July 1938, he and his crew flew a Lockheed 14 around the world in 91 hours and 14 minutes, although the route was too short to count as an official circumnavigation record.

His best-known flight was his shortest. On November 2, 1947, he lifted the giant H-4 Hercules flying boat off the water for its only flight, about 70 feet up for roughly a mile, by most accounts. The “Spruce Goose” was built almost entirely of birch.

2. Amelia Earhart

Earhart’s first Atlantic crossing, in June 1928, made her famous, but she did not fly the airplane. She rode as a passenger with two male pilots, and said afterward she felt like “a sack of potatoes.”

She fixed that on May 20 and 21, 1932, flying a Lockheed Vega 5B alone from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland to a field near Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The 2,026-mile (3,260 km) crossing took about 15 hours and made her the first woman, and only the second person after Lindbergh, to fly the Atlantic nonstop and solo.

In January 1935, she became the first person of either sex to fly solo from Hawaii to the US mainland. Two years later, she and navigator Fred Noonan vanished in her Lockheed Electra 10E on the 2,556-mile (4,113 km) leg from Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island.

They left Lae on July 2, 1937, with 22,000 miles (35,400 km) of the world flight already behind them. She was declared lost at sea on July 19.

3. The Wright Brothers

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made four flights in a powered, controlled airplane at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. That is about 4 miles south of Kitty Hawk, the nearest village and telegraph station, which is why the name stuck.

Orville flew first: 120 feet (37 m) in 12 seconds. Wilbur flew last and longest: 852 feet (260 m) in 59 seconds. The Flyer had a 12-horsepower engine, and a gust wrecked it after the fourth flight; it never flew again.

A number that gets misquoted: the first flight’s often-cited 6.8 mph (11 km/h) was its speed over the ground, into a 27 mph headwind. Its airspeed was about 34 mph (55 km/h), according to the National Park Service.

4. Charles Lindbergh

Lindbergh was not the first to fly the Atlantic nonstop. John Alcock and Arthur Brown did that in June 1919, flying a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland.

What Lindbergh did was fly it alone, and all the way from New York to Paris. He took off from Roosevelt Field on May 20, 1927, in the Ryan NYP Spirit of St. Louis, and landed at Le Bourget 33 hours and 30 minutes later, 3,610 miles (5,810 km) away.

He was 25, and the flight won him the $25,000 Orteig Prize. He also could not see straight ahead. The fuel tanks sat in front of the cockpit, so he looked forward through a periscope or by turning the aircraft to look out a side window.

5. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger

On January 15, 2009, US Airways flight 1549, an Airbus A320, hit a flock of Canada geese at 2,818 feet about two minutes after leaving LaGuardia. Both engines lost almost all their thrust.

Sullenberger took control and ditched in the Hudson River about 8.5 miles (13.7 km) from the airport. By the timestamps in the NTSB report, about three and a half minutes passed between the call of “birds” and the end of the cockpit recording. All 155 people aboard survived.

The 2016 film suggested investigators thought he could have made a runway. The final report says a return worked in simulation only if the turn began immediately after the bird strike, and concluded that ditching gave the best chance of survival. The full story is in our breakdown of US Airways Flight 1549.

6. Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron

Richthofen is officially credited with 80 victories, the highest total of any pilot in the air war of World War I. He was killed on April 21, 1918, at 25.

The famous red triplane accounts for only part of that. He scored most of his victories in Albatros fighters, and only 19 of his last 21 in the Fokker Dr.I; the first aircraft he painted bright red was an Albatros D.III, in January 1917.

The RAF officially credited Canadian pilot Roy Brown with shooting him down. Later analysis found the fatal bullet could only have come from the ground, and historians now point to Australian ground fire, most likely Sergeant Cedric Popkin’s machine gun. Australian officers carried his coffin at a full military funeral.

7. Chuck Yeager

On October 14, 1947, Yeager was dropped from a B-29 in the Bell XS-1 Glamorous Glennis and flew it to Mach 1.06, about 700 mph (1,127 km/h), at 43,000 feet over the Mojave. It was the first verified, instrumented supersonic flight in level flight.

He did it with two broken ribs from a horseback riding accident the weekend before. He told only fellow pilot Jack Ridley, who helped him squeeze into the cockpit.

North American test pilot George Welch may have gone supersonic in a dive in the XP-86 that same month, but his aircraft was not instrumented, so the claim cannot be proven.

Yeager went on to fly the X-1A to Mach 2.44 in 1953, on the way to the records in our fastest aircraft in the world ranking, and died in 2020 at 97.

8. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Most of his readers know him as the author of The Little Prince, but Saint-Exupéry was a working pilot first. He flew the mail for Aéropostale from 1926, on the route from Toulouse to Dakar, and later ran its Argentine subsidiary.

In December 1935, during an attempt at a Paris-to-Saigon flight, he crashed in the Sahara with his mechanic, André Prévot. They survived four days in the desert before Bedouin found them, a story he told in Wind, Sand and Stars.

On July 31, 1944, he took off from Corsica in an F-5B, an unarmed photo-reconnaissance version of the P-38 Lightning, and never returned.

His bracelet turned up in a fishing net in 1998, and the wreck was found off Marseille in 2000. Why he went down is still unknown; a former Luftwaffe pilot’s 2008 claim to have shot him down has never been verified.

9. Francis Gary Powers

On May 1, 1960, Powers, a CIA pilot, was flying a U-2 spy plane from Peshawar, Pakistan across the Soviet Union when the Soviets fired 14 SA-2 missiles at him. One exploded behind his aircraft at about 70,500 feet.

G-forces pinned him against the canopy, so he could not use the ejection seat and climbed out instead. The same salvo also shot down a Soviet MiG-19, killing its pilot.

A Soviet court sentenced him to three years in prison and seven more of hard labor. On February 10, 1962, he was exchanged for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel on Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge.

Critics said he should have destroyed the plane, but the destruct charge was only designed to wreck the camera. The Air Force awarded him a posthumous Silver Star in 2012; he had died in 1977, flying a TV news helicopter in Los Angeles.

10. Jimmy Doolittle

Doolittle is remembered for one raid, but he was aviation’s great test pilot between the wars. He won the 1925 Schneider Trophy at 232 mph (373 km/h), took a doctorate in aeronautics from MIT the same year, and won both the Bendix and Thompson races in the early 1930s.

On September 24, 1929, he made the first flight entirely by instruments, from takeoff to landing, in a Consolidated NY-2 with a safety pilot along. It lasted 15 minutes.

On April 18, 1942, he led 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers off the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities. Spotted by a picket boat, they launched about 10 hours early and 170 nautical miles farther out than planned; 15 crashed in China and one landed at Vladivostok.

Having lost every aircraft, Doolittle expected a court-martial. Instead he was promoted two grades to brigadier general and awarded the Medal of Honor.

11. Paul Tibbets

Tibbets piloted the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, named after his mother, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The bomb was released at 8:15 a.m. local time from 31,060 feet, with a crew of 12 aboard.

He commanded the 509th Composite Group, about 1,800 men formed for the atomic mission, and had more B-29 time than any other pilot. Earlier in the war, he flew General Eisenhower to Gibraltar ahead of the invasion of North Africa.

The legend of the Hiroshima pilot driven mad by guilt belongs to Claude Eatherly, who flew a weather plane that day. Tibbets said he slept clearly every night. He died in 2007 and asked for no funeral or headstone, fearing protesters.

12. Erich Hartmann

Hartmann is credited with 352 aerial victories, 345 of them Soviet, the highest tally ever claimed by a fighter pilot. He flew the Messerschmitt Bf 109 with JG 52 on the Eastern Front, across 1,404 combat missions.

The number is a wartime claim, not a confirmed count. Researchers who compared his claims against Soviet loss records put the real figure much lower, with one Russian estimate at 70 to 80.

He surrendered to US forces in May 1945, was handed to the Soviets, and spent about 10 years in prison camps before his release in 1955. His mother, one of Germany’s first women glider pilots, taught him to fly.

13. Bessie Coleman

No American flight school would accept Bessie Coleman, so she trained in France. On June 15, 1921, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale issued her a pilot’s licence, the first held by an African American woman and, according to the Smithsonian, by a Native American woman.

Back home she became a barnstormer, and refused to perform for segregated crowds. She died on April 30, 1926, near Jacksonville, Florida, when a loose wrench jammed the controls of a Curtiss JN-4 flown by her mechanic. She was not strapped in and was thrown out.

She is sometimes called the first Black pilot of all, which is not quite right: Eugene Bullard flew in combat for France from 1917. In 1992, astronaut Mae Jemison carried Coleman’s photo into space.

14. Douglas Bader

Bader did not lose his legs in combat. On December 14, 1931, he tried a low roll in a Bristol Bulldog on a dare, caught a wingtip, and lost both legs.

His logbook entry read: “Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show.”

A medical board ended his flying in 1933, but he passed the RAF’s flying tests and rejoined in 1939. He flew Hurricanes and Spitfires in 1940, led a wing in 1941, and was credited with 20 confirmed victories by the RAF Museum’s count.

He was brought down over France in August 1941, possibly by friendly fire, and left one artificial leg in the cockpit. The RAF dropped him a replacement during a bombing raid, and he ended the war in Colditz.

15. Hans-Ulrich Rudel

Rudel flew the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka on the Eastern Front and is credited with 2,530 combat missions and 519 tanks destroyed. The tank figure is his claim, and no primary source confirms it.

He was the only recipient of the Knight’s Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. After losing his right leg in February 1945, he was flying combat again within weeks.

He is on this list because people look him up, not because he is admired here. He remained a committed Nazi, helped fugitives including Josef Mengele from Argentina, and in 1976 cost two West German generals their jobs by attending a veterans’ meeting at an air base.

16. Robin Olds

Olds was a World War II ace with 12 official victories in P-38s and P-51s. Two decades later, he commanded the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, the “Wolfpack,” in Vietnam.

On January 2, 1967, he led Operation Bolo, sending F-4 Phantoms along the routes, altitudes and formations of slower F-105 bombers. North Vietnamese MiG-21s rose to meet what they thought were bombers, and seven were shot down in 12 minutes, with no US losses.

He downed four MiGs in Vietnam and, by his own account, avoided a fifth on purpose, because becoming an ace would have gotten him sent home. His unregulation handlebar mustache is the origin of the Air Force’s “Mustache March.”

17. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington

Boyington commanded the Marine squadron VMF-214, the “Black Sheep,” flying the F4U Corsair in the Solomon Islands in 1943. At 31 he was about a decade older than his pilots, hence “Pappy.”

His Medal of Honor citation credits him with 26 aircraft destroyed. The Marine Corps later made it 28, counting six victories he claimed with the Flying Tigers, although Flying Tigers records credit him with fewer.

Shot down over Rabaul on January 3, 1944, he spent 20 months as a prisoner of war. His memoir became the 1970s TV series Baa Baa Black Sheep, which Boyington himself called “hogwash and Hollywood hokum.”

18. Richard Bong

Bong is America’s top-scoring ace, with 40 victories, every one of them in a P-38 Lightning over the Pacific. He passed Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record of 26 on April 12, 1944.

General Douglas MacArthur presented his Medal of Honor on December 12, 1944. He admitted he was a poor shot and made up for it by closing to point-blank range.

He died on August 6, 1945, when the fuel pump failed on a P-80 Shooting Star jet he was testing at Burbank. His death shared the front pages with the bombing of Hiroshima the same day.

19. Hanna Reitsch

Reitsch was the first woman to fly a helicopter, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, in 1937, and in 1938 she flew it inside a Berlin sports hall. She set more than 40 altitude and endurance records in powered aircraft and gliders.

As a wartime test pilot, she crash-landed the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet in 1942 and spent five months in hospital. On April 26, 1945, she flew into besieged Berlin with General Robert Ritter von Greim, landing their light plane on the city’s East-West Axis boulevard after he was wounded at the controls.

In the 1970s she still said she was not ashamed of having believed in National Socialism. She was setting records in 1979, the year she died, with a 498-mile (802 km) women’s gliding record flown along the Appalachians.

20. Eddie Rickenbacker

Rickenbacker was already a famous race car driver, a starter in the 1912 Indianapolis 500, before he went to war. With 26 confirmed victories, he became America’s top ace of World War I, commanding the 94th Aero Squadron.

President Hoover awarded him the Medal of Honor in 1930 for attacking seven German aircraft alone on September 25, 1918. He later ran Eastern Air Lines.

In October 1942, a B-17 carrying him across the Pacific got lost and ditched in the Pacific. The survivors drifted for three weeks or more, 21 to 24 days depending on the account, and lived partly on a seagull that landed on Rickenbacker’s head.

What the Ranking Shows

Fourteen of the 20 are American, which partly reflects the English-language Wikipedia used to measure them. Four are German, one French and one British.

War dominates the list. Eight of the 20 were fighter aces, and three more, Powers, Doolittle and Tibbets, are best known for a single wartime or Cold War mission.

Only three are women: Earhart, Coleman and Reitsch. And only one, Sully, flew for an airline.

FAQ

Who is the most famous pilot ever?

Measured by how many people look them up, Howard Hughes is the most famous pilot, with 1,917,886 English Wikipedia readers in the 12 months to August 2026. Amelia Earhart was a close second with 1,831,818. If you count Neil Armstrong, whose fame rests on the Moon landing, he would rank second.

Who are the top 10 most famous pilots in the world?

By a year of Wikipedia readership, the top 10 are Howard Hughes, Amelia Earhart, the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh, Sully Sullenberger, Manfred von Richthofen, Chuck Yeager, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Francis Gary Powers and Jimmy Doolittle. The most famous pilots are not necessarily the best ones, and the best fighter pilots make a different list.

Who was the first pilot?

Orville Wright piloted the first powered, controlled airplane flight on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It covered 120 feet in 12 seconds. Wilbur flew the longest flight that day, 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Who is the most famous female pilot?

Amelia Earhart is the most famous female pilot by a wide margin. In 1932 she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic nonstop and solo, and she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937. Bessie Coleman, the first African American woman to hold a pilot’s licence, is next among women on this list.

Who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier?

Chuck Yeager made the first verified supersonic flight on October 14, 1947, reaching Mach 1.06 at 43,000 feet in the Bell XS-1. George Welch may have exceeded Mach 1 in a dive in the XP-86 that same month, but his aircraft carried no instruments to prove it.

Who is the most famous airline pilot?

Chesley Sully Sullenberger is the most famous airline pilot. On January 15, 2009, he ditched US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River after a bird strike knocked out both engines, and all 155 people aboard survived. His Wikipedia article drew 746,970 readers in the past year.

Was Charles Lindbergh the first person to fly across the Atlantic?

No. John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the Atlantic nonstop in June 1919. Lindbergh was the first to do it solo, flying 3,610 miles from New York to Paris in 33 hours and 30 minutes in May 1927.

Who is the highest-scoring fighter pilot of all time?

Erich Hartmann of Germany is credited with 352 victories, the highest total ever claimed, although researchers comparing Soviet loss records believe the real number is much lower. The top American ace is Richard Bong, with 40 victories in the P-38 Lightning.