This is the untold story of the Cold War race to build the perfect fighter plane. We begin with the Soviet rollout of its MiG-25 fighter, a direct response to the inability of earlier MiGs to catch British reconnaissance aircraft taking photos of Soviet airbases. Stalin vows to never let the West have the upperhand.

US military planners develop the F-103, a plane with Mach 4 speeds, as the replacement for its F-86 Sabre Jets in the air over Korea. Two solutions to using fighters as a line of defence for long-range bombers are presented: the bizarre pairing of two F-82 Mustangs attached at the wingtip for long flight and a parasitic fighter carried in the belly of the mothership bomber.

We then recall one of the Superpower's most remarkable fighters, the Canadian-built Avro Arrow. An all-titanium body capable of Mach 2 speeds, it is suddenly cancelled in the middle of its production in 1959. We answer the question as to why it was scrapped so suddenly, we then revisit the Soviet deployment of the MiG-25, an aircraft with strange similarities to the Avro Arrow.

We meet Korean War veteran pilot and Air Force legend John Boyd and revisit his "Top Gun" style of outmanoeuvring enemy fighters in air-to-air combat. During the Vietnam War Boyd is called back to retrain the military on his combat techniques and a new generation of fighter designs, the F-15 and later the F-16, emerges.

We end with a look at the forthcoming F-22, the first totally new fighter design in 20 years, and its Russian counterpart, the MiG-31.