I grew up in the '80s and spent a lot of time on the PC flight simulators, especially the Microprose ones. My favorite fighter is the F-15, without question, followed by the F-14. I remember being exceptionally annoyed when the film Iron Eagle came out -- I think I must have been ten years old -- and found out that it featured the F-16, not the F-15.
@Rapp, I was born in 92, but father flew huey slicks in Nam for US Army. Grew up reading every freaking book like wright stuff or other test pilot stories. Solo'd as a teen. Played a lot of IL2 Sturmovik through hyperlobby with F4U Corsair, actually I taught all the carrier ops for a online squadron. Had one nutty online game mission with squadron of sink a destroyer in game at night with night navigation 4+ hours over dark sea then find a 200ft spec in ocean to land again. Hands were physically dretched with sweat on an X-52 hours into it with a damaged plane low fuel, finally saw the carrier again, all set on maxed settings, the ship was shooting a small boat or I'd sure I would've missed seeing it, no lights on, and I'd snagged the third wire, sunk the enemy ship, plane half blown to hell and leaking fuel. Eagles of War was squadron name, we all disbanded late teens due to growing up. Basically you could set up missions so hard. Everyone hated LA-7 it hardly ever stalled, common online threat. Couple of 20mm hits and thing would go down. .50 cals felt like bb pellets on those, lol. We stuck with A2G drop 3 x500lbs and eight rockets on enemy airport from corsairs then wreck with 500-3000 rounds ammo on takeoffs/enemy CAP flights. American planes always took teamwork to win. And we wouldn't let up until kick from server. Kill the AA guns and well it just got more fun for strategic bombers to carpet bomb like acres upon acres. Servers hated us, lol. One guy Whamo would do P-38 and 10 rockets, then launch rockets at runway behind plane as it just got off runway/ground then explosion splash would kill it. Server admins actually laughed and said that was fair. The WW2 sims were hard from lack of all the modern aids, at best a bunch of unguided free fall bombs/unguided rockets. And deflection shooting in turn fights+teamwork. Timers and a printed map with a lot of thinking required. Started with MS95 as a tiny kid. FS2004 with a bunch of payware planes from Carenado were a joy for actual realism training, useful flight school aid.
Wanted to fly for a living but ran out of $$$ plus bad economy furloughed my father like 2005 ish for five years. Wound up studying engineering for college for about six years with some failed classes, always retook them, but god so boring sometimes compared to flight which well I never regretted a second of lol. Modified DCS World the SU-25 free simulator to run F-15E/F-16 before they had patched that a bunch with SU-25 cockpit. You could layer Air defense and modern threats in a mountainous region and make a hard task about 25x more intense, some ways I felt it was harder than the WW2 sims due to threat engagement distances so realistic, you had a printout of all the ranges, weapon systems in an AO, because it narrowed the attack profiles into valleys to have long enough view times to lock all the modern gizmos due to terrain blocking line of sight on mavs/targeting pods. Newest russian missile frigate on sea targets like swatted 60+ B-52s loaded with AGM-84s and 86s dropping entire payloads in saturation runs, from different directions, I was horrified. Beat it by depleting missiles on ship no joke with well more allied missiles far off. LOL. All those Russia jokes and mother of god... A wall of missiles, accurate, long range, and ouch. If mobile ground SAM only the -65E laser maverick would lock. F-15E carried enough CBUs and Mavericks to knock out light naval fleets, but a pig to fly when you wanted a turn fight. It liked high speed zoom and boom. Stable platform though in sim. F-16 felt like never enough fuel, but a per joy point shoot unleash 12x mavericks or a few GBU-12s... Fried an ol' PC with a nivida on it. The campaign missions ground attack were horrifying realistic and always had not impossible, but very thought intense ways to attack or certain death would result. Radar AA threats and had to rearm to drop those, but usually it was best to avoid all AA and help the allied ground grunts get objectives. Bad weather made SAM avoidance nill impossible because you had to see the units through obsolete targeting pod forward looking... This dork is 20/20 corrected. Doubt the AF would let me fly, the exams paperwork wise felt easier... Army seems open minded.
Flight sim rants... Good times yet wasted tons of hours I don't wanna think about. Perhaps months/years of life gone. Hahaha.
If I had to pick a beautiful sounding fighter jet. F-4E hands down with J-79 engines, heard a restored one at an Airshow. Dad was having happy flashbacks, and the chest was vibrating thousands of feet away on a slow flyby. He had a story how one did a victory roll right over the heli bout 100ft off nose and wacked a bunch of AAA nests that no one else even briefed on next to a treeline they were told to drop several platoons of troops onto. His unit, started picking own flight routes after that screw up. Joke was later somebody had sent them to an AA practice range by accident.