F-15 vs F-22: Which Fighter Is Better, and Why the Eagle Outlived Its Replacement

How we are comparing these two jets

Most “which is better” arguments about these two talk past each other, because one side is scoring a fight and the other is scoring an air force. We rank them on four measures and name the winner of each.

Air combat and survivability go to the F-22. Cost to fly and staying power go to the F-15. Top speed, often quoted as the tiebreaker, barely matters, and we explain why below.

Where a figure is published, we use the official number. Radar cross-section is classified for both jets, so we do not repeat the invented figures that circulate online. Full specifications for the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor and the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle sit in our aircraft database.

Where the F-22 Raptor wins

Stealth decides who shoots first

The F-15 was designed in the late 1960s with no attempt at stealth. It hangs its missiles on the outside of the airframe, and nothing about its shape was chosen to hide it from radar.

The Raptor was shaped from the start to defeat fire-control radars, and it carries every air-to-air weapon inside the fuselage. That puts it among the true stealth fighter jets, and the F-15 nowhere near them.

The gap is generational. The F-15 is a fourth-generation fighter and the F-22 a fifth-generation one, a split we explain in our guide to the five generations of fighter planes.

Mike “Dozer” Shower, a pilot who flew both jets, put the result bluntly. The F-22 against a fourth-generation fighter, he said, “is like having two football teams against each other and one of them is invisible!”

Supercruise and thrust vectoring

The F-22 can hold speeds above Mach 1.5 without afterburner, which the Air Force calls supercruise. An F-15 has to light its afterburners to go supersonic, and afterburner drains fuel quickly.

The Raptor also points its engine exhaust up and down through two-dimensional thrust vectoring nozzles. That lets it move its nose at angles where normal control surfaces stop working, something the F-15 was never built to do.

Together they let the F-22 choose when a fight starts and when it ends. It can arrive supersonic with fuel to spare, and disengage without spending its reserve to do it.

A cockpit that does the work

In an F-15C, the pilot builds the tactical picture by hand. Shower described it this way: “In an F-15 you’re sensor operator, you’re working the radar.”

The F-22’s AN/APG-77 radar and passive sensors feed one fused display instead. In Shower’s words, the Raptor “does it all for you,” which leaves the pilot free to fight.

Would an F-22 beat an F-15 in a dogfight?

Almost certainly, and the Air Force has already tested the question. At Exercise Northern Edge in Alaska in 2006, F-22s ran up a 108-to-zero kill ratio against the best F-15, F-16 and F-18 adversaries the exercise could field.

The Raptors took on as many as 40 opposing aircraft in those simulated battles. They also held a 97 percent mission capable rate during the exercise, far above anything the fleet has managed in recent years.

The F-15 is no pushover up close. Its engines produce more thrust than it weighs at combat weight, its large wing turns hard, and it carries the same eight air-to-air missiles as a Raptor, just on the outside.

The problem is getting close. An F-15 pilot has to find a target their radar struggles to see, and by then the Raptor has usually already fired.

Where the F-15 Eagle wins

A combat record the Raptor cannot match

The F-15 has a combined air-to-air record of 104 kills and no losses, a tally counted through 2008. The air-superiority models, the A, B, C and D, have no recorded losses to enemy action.

In the 1991 Gulf War, US Air Force F-15Cs scored 34 of the service’s 37 air-to-air victories. Israeli Eagles account for a large share of the rest of the total.

The F-22 has flown combat since 2014, when it bombed targets in Syria, and in 2026 it flew combat operations against Iran from Ovda Air Base in Israel. No F-22 kill against a crewed enemy aircraft has been made public.

Far cheaper to fly

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2026 reimbursement rates, the hourly price charged to other Defense Department users, put the F-22A at $55,051 per flight hour. The old F-15C is billed at $35,468, about a third less, up sharply from $24,566 a year earlier.

The new F-15EX is the real bargain at $17,321 an hour, less than a third of the Raptor’s rate. The F-35A, at $18,600, costs slightly more than the F-15EX, a matchup we cover in our F-35 vs F-15 comparison.

More often ready to fly

In fiscal 2024 the F-22 fleet was mission capable 40.19 percent of the time, down from 52 percent a year earlier. The F-15C managed 52.9 percent and the two-seat F-15D 63.7 percent.

Part of that Eagle gain came from retiring the most worn-out jets, so read it with care. The F-15EX posted 83.13 percent, from a fleet of just eight aircraft at the time.

Exports, numbers and a live production line

McDonnell Douglas and its license partners built 1,198 air-superiority Eagles in the A, B, C, D, J and DJ versions, and Israel, Japan and Saudi Arabia all fly the type. Boeing, which now owns McDonnell Douglas, is still building new F-15s today.

Only 195 Raptors were ever built, and US law has barred any foreign sale since fiscal 1998. No ally flies one, and with the line long closed, none is likely to.

Why the Eagle outlived its replacement

The Raptor was built to take over from the F-15. The Air Force first planned 750 of them, cut that to 381, and in April 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates capped production at 187 operational jets.

The last F-22 was delivered in May 2012. With too few Raptors to cover the mission, the Air Force kept flying its F-15Cs long past their planned retirement.

That extension is still running. The Air Force plans to keep 42 F-15C/Ds through 2028 and its 21 healthiest “Platinum Eagles” at Fresno, California, through 2030 for homeland air defense.

The Eagle’s real successor is another Eagle. In its fiscal 2027 budget request the Air Force more than doubled its planned F-15EX Eagle II buy, from 129 to 267, to replace old F-15C/Ds and the A-10 and to start retiring the F-15E Strike Eagle.

The Raptor, meanwhile, is a fixed fleet of about 184 jets. US law bars the Air Force from retiring any before September 30, 2027, and the House version of the fiscal 2027 defense bill would stretch that to 2032.

That bill passed the House 216 to 212 on July 22, 2026, but it stalled in the Senate and had not become law as of September 2026.

The F-22’s eventual successor is Boeing’s F-47, a sixth-generation fighter picked on March 21, 2025, with a first flight expected in 2028. As recently as 2024, the Air Force’s air combat commander said there was “no official replacement to the F-22 right now.”

Both jets are caught in a wider squeeze: the US Air Force fighter fleet has dropped below the size Congress requires, which is why neither type can be retired quickly.

Has the F-15 ever lost a dogfight?

Not to an enemy fighter, on the record. The F-15 counts 104 air-to-air kills and no air-to-air losses through 2008, and the air-superiority A to D models have no recorded losses to enemy action.

Strike Eagles have been lost in other ways. On March 2, 2026, three US F-15Es were shot down over Kuwait in an apparent friendly-fire incident during Operation Epic Fury against Iran.

All six crew ejected safely. Later reports said one or more Kuwaiti F/A-18s fired on them, and the incident was still under investigation at the time of reporting.

A month later, Iran brought one down. On April 3, 2026, an F-15E from the 494th Fighter Squadron was shot down over southwestern Iran, near Yasuj, reportedly by a shoulder-fired missile.

Both crew ejected over Iranian territory. The pilot was rescued about seven hours later and the weapon systems officer on April 5, after a large US rescue operation.

Neither loss came from an enemy fighter, so the Eagle’s air-to-air record still stands.

Can any plane beat the F-22?

No aircraft has been shown to beat it. The Raptor has never faced a peer fighter in real combat, so the honest answer rests on exercises like Northern Edge, where it lost nothing.

The nearest challengers are China’s Chengdu J-20 and Russia’s Su-57, both fifth-generation stealth designs. We compare the F-22 against the Chengdu J-20 and the F-22 against the Su-57 Felon separately.

The Raptor’s bigger weakness is not an opponent. It is a fleet of about 184 jets that was ready to fly 40 percent of the time in 2024, with no production line to replace any it loses.

The verdict

If one aircraft had to win a fight for control of the sky, take the F-22. It sees first, shoots first and leaves on its own terms, and nothing in the F-15’s design can change that.

If you are paying for an air force, the F-15 makes a case the Raptor cannot. It costs far less per hour, above all the new F-15EX, it is ready more often, allies fly it, and new ones are coming off the line.

The Air Force built the F-22 to retire the F-15 and got the opposite. For the Raptor against its stealthy stablemate, see our F-22 vs F-35 comparison, and for the wider field, our ranking of the best fighter jets in the world.