ACE COMBAT 8 Aircraft List: All 34 Planes, Classes and Unlocks

The launch hangar: 34 aircraft, four roles

ACE COMBAT 8 launched on October 1-2, 2026 with 34 aircraft, organized into four roles — Fighter, Multirole, Attacker and Electronic Warfare. Players pick both aircraft and loadout before each sortie, and the role is the first filter in that choice: roles group airframes by intended use, the way the series has always split fighters, attackers and multirole types.

What follows is every airframe official material showed before launch and where it appears, then how the rest of the roster unlocks through the Aircraft Tree.

Confirmed player aircraft

Four of those — the Typhoon, Su-57, F-35 and a yellow F-16 — appear together in one official screenshot in striking paint schemes, confirming a special-livery system alongside the Deluxe Edition’s customizable cosmetic set.

Confirmed hostile and neutral types

Screenshots put faces on the opposition too:

• SU-25SM Frogfoot — ground-attack aircraft over the snow-valley map, worth +340 score each.
• MQ-19 — a hostile drone type engaged above the clouds, +100 score.
• Lux Lunae’s black interceptors — the 55th Unit’s twin-tailed, black-and-gold interceptors shown in the squadron introduction card (see the aces and wingmen guide).

What the four roles mean in practice

The roles are Fighter, Multirole, Attacker and Electronic Warfare — the series’ traditional split, now an explicit in-game category. The verified roster spans four decades: MiG-21bis and F-4E at the vintage end, Rafale M and Su-57 at the modern end, dedicated ground-attack frames like the A-10C, jamming platforms like the EA-18G Growler and EA-6B Prowler, plus Project ACES’ fictional designs — the FA-36, whose base firepower tops the base-game roster per launch guides, and the swing-wing X-02.

How the Aircraft Tree unlocks the rest

Aircraft unlock through the Aircraft Tree, a branching tech tree paid in MRP earned from mission scores, and parts are purchased from the same tree — so every MRP decision doubles as an equipment decision. Early unlock guides put the full tree at roughly nine million MRP, which makes spending order the real strategy question. The best planes guide ranks the post-launch consensus picks (F-22A for air superiority, F-35C as the all-rounder), the best starting aircraft guide covers the hangar before the tree opens, and the parts and loadouts guide explains the per-aircraft slot system.

Special weapons per airframe

One clear change: every airframe carries two special weapon slots. The menu rows — SELECT SP WEAPON 1 and SELECT SP WEAPON 2 — appear regardless of aircraft, with loadouts differing by pilot choice, and the launch pool counts 29 special weapons filtered per airframe; the special weapons guide tracks the full list.

Reading this list

The table above is the airframe set official material showed before launch; the verified base roster adds roughly twenty more airframes catalogued by the community wiki, from the A-6E Intruder to the Gripen E. If you want the campaign context for where these aircraft fight, the campaign overview sets the scene of the Sotoa-Usea War.