The Age of Aces may be behind us. Since the Vietnam war, no American pilot has successfully shot down five enemy planes to earn the title. The pilot who came closest, Cesar Rodriguez, amassed three kills of Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) fighters across two wars spanning almost ten years in the 1990s. There are several reasons for this, but it mostly stems from the fact that few air forces want to challenge American pilots in the skies anymore, while ground-based anti-aircraft systems have become so effective that up-close, air-to-air combat has become far less common.
The Vietnam war produced a total of five American
