I Thought The Answer Was "Maverick"

Or maybe that Iron Eagle kid who learned how to fly a fighter jet in a single montage.

StrategyPage has a different take:

Who was the best fighter pilot ever? This is a question often debated, and never settled. Manfred von Richtoven (better known as the Red Baron of World War I) is one such contender. Another is Erich Hartmann, who is the all-time kills leader with 352 in World War II. Was it David McCampbell, who shot down nine aircraft in a single sortie on October 24, 1944? A case could be made for each of them, but the fact is, one cannot really determine who the best of all time was.

Over 5,400 pilots have become aces, and they have only one thing in common: Shooting down five or more enemy aircraft in air-to-air combat. Not much else exists. In the ninety-one years of air combat (from World War I to the present), the aircraft have advanced from the Sopwith Camel to the F-22. The skills needed to become an ace have changed, and so has the nature of air combat. In the days of Richtoven and Hartmann, many of the kills were with machine guns. This held through the Korean War, but the planes were getting faster through each war (from 190 kilometers per hour for the Sopwith Camel to 635 kilometers per hour for the Me-109 flown by Hartmann to 1,091 kilometers per hour for the F-86F that dominated the skies over Korea). Then, in Vietnam, missiles began to enter the fray, allowing kills to be done from as far as 18 kilometers away with the AIM-9 Sidewinder. Today, the AMRAAM and other missiles allow kills to be made without even seeing the opposing aircraft (from as far as 70 kilometers away in the case of the AMRAAM).

Even during a war, the circumstances faced by these aces were different. Hartmann was in constant combat from 1942 on – most of it against Russian pilots. This was a contrast to the American practice of constantly sending experienced combat pilots, like John S. Thach (inventor of the “Thach weave”), back to train new pilots. Thach had only seven kills, but the Thach weave still worked twenty years after the end of World War II, when propeller driven A-1 Skyraiders used it to shoot down a MiG-17 jets.