By: Caleb Larson
Japan's F-15J is a licence-built Eagle and it was never a complete one. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries assembled most of the fleet in Japan, working from the McDonnell Douglas design, but early aircraft went without the full American electronic countermeasures suite and without certain classified avionics. What Japan did over the following decades was fill the gaps itself, integrating domestic weapons and datalinks until the aircraft had diverged into something of its own.