The Top 10 Pilots in Science Fiction

The Definitive List, Says Jimbo

(Author’s Note: Substack tells me that you might have trouble viewing this whole post in your email. If so, you can just click on “Read in App” or click on the title of the article in your browser to open the post in your browser.)

People in Science Fiction are always going somewhere. Whether it’s within the same star system, to a different star system or maybe even another galaxy altogether, there is always someplace our characters need to be. The story is, more often than not, as much about the journey as what happens once we get there. Although, not always.

Sometimes, the story is about a fight. Sometimes, what you need is to really just rip into someone physically. When the enemies shields are down, his ship is venting atmosphere and there are fires burning, you know you’re about to be on the winning side. There is no more relieving feeling than to see your enemies ship crippled before your still functional ship. It means you get to live to see tomorrow.

Regardless of which category you fit into, you’re going to need a pilot. Someone who can make your spacecraft go where it needs to go so that it can do what it needs to do. Someone who can dodge both asteroids (and those are WAY more common in SF than they are in real life) and fire from enemy vessels. Whether you’re trying to position yourself to take a shot with The Everloving Weapon of Awesomely Massive Doom or trying to get away from same is largely irrelevant: You need a person at the controls who can get you to where you need to be.

What follows is a list of the ten best pilots in all of Science Fiction per Jimbo. Feel free to disagree in the comments. Just know that you’re not going to change my mind. I am Jimbo. Here me roar.

Or sumfin’!

So without further ado, here are the Ten Best Pilots in all of Science Fiction:

10.) Hoban Washburne - Firefly

We all love Captain Mal. The fact remains that that guy got his crew into a lot of crap. He was always trying to sneak in somewhere or run away from something. Whatever he was doing, it was Wash’s job to get the Serenity to where it needed to go.

I can’t imagine what went through Wash’s mind given some of the orders he got. In the end though, it didn’t matter. He got the job done.

9.) Alex Rogan - The Last Starfighter

If you didn’t dream of mastering an arcade game and flying off to fight the Kodan Armada, you weren’t a Science Fiction fan in the mid-Eighties. What Steve Rogan did, hanging out playing a game till Grig showed up to recruit him for a real war wherein he became the first human to leave his home system and journey into the universe beyond was the stuff of dreams and legends. Winning the battle was just the icing on the cake.

And hey, who hasn’t wanted to go all Death Blossom on the bad guys at some point in their life? Rogan and Grig wiped out the whole armada themselves and it was Rogan who flew a Starfighter into battle alone with minimal training and zero experience and won. You can’t ask more from a pilot than that.

8.) Captain Steven Hiller - Independence Day

What could you possibly want from a pilot who led an alien fighter through a series of canyons and then shot it down? Other than trash talking the alien the entire time he was shooting him down, I mean. Possibly walking away from his own plane crash puffing on a victory cigar? Or maybe learning to fly an alien spacecraft to take it to the mother ship and save the world?

Seriously, once you’ve done all that, I’ve got nothin’. You’ve done it all. Take a bow, Captain Hiller. You made it onto the list at Number 8.

7.) Miriya Parina Sterling - Robotech

The Zentraedi are a race of warrior clones, whose commanders, the Robotech Masters, segregate them by gender. Males form the core of their army, but females are the ace fighter pilots. It’s the women who fly the elite Female Power Armor, the Queadluun-Rau, and they are the elite forces.

Miriya is the best pilot among her peers. She has killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enemies in a career spanning the stars. She arrives in-system and decides she’s going to find and defeat the best that humanity has to offer. She goes straight at Roy Fokker, veteran of the Global Civil War and leader of the elite Skull Squadron, wounding him fatally. She is vengeance incarnate, defeating all before her before she runs in to…

6.) Max Sterling - Robotech

Max Sterling is known to his friends as a of combat virtuoso. The man can do things with a Veritech fighter that aren’t physically possible and make it look easy. He amazed his commanding officer, Rick Hunter his first time out and got better after that. Before Max Sterling, Miriya Parina was the undefeated Mistress of the Space Lanes, Destroyer of all who Stood Before Her. Afterward, she was his wife.

That’s right, the scourge of the space lanes was so impressed with his combat prowess that she married him. They pair produced Dana Sterling, heroine of the Second Robotech War, member of the Tactical Armored Space Corps, she was very nearly included on this list in her own right.

That’s the first half. Are you read to see who’s left, or would you like to take a guess? I’ll wait.

…

…

…

…

That should be long enough.

5.) Captain Kara “Starbuck” Thrace - Battlestar Galactica

All of the pilots above performed admirable and heroic deeds. All of them did things that most other pilots could only dream of. Starbuck was a touch above all of them though.

Starbuck fought the Cylons, a robotic enemy. They could react faster and more accurately. They could take more of a beating even though they looked human. They were, in short, super enemies. She managed to not just to survive, but to thrive among them. That, in and of itself wouldn’t have gotten her on the list though.

No, Starbuck took it a step further. She managed to steal a Cylon fighter and fly it back to her home Battlestar. Think about that. It was a type of spacecraft she had no familiarity with and she got it home through a war zone and managed to get through her own who had identified her as the enemy. That’s stone cold. That’s why Starbuck gets the fifth spot on the list.

4.) Captain Carmen Ibanez - Starship Troopers

Carmen was perhaps not the nicest person where one Lt. Johnny Rico was concerned. That’s neither here nor there. She was, however, the woman who could out-navigate an experienced pilot less than a week after she got onto her first starship. She managed to get her ship out of its moorings faster than any other pilot and scared the crap out of her CO and her training officer doing it. She managed to conn her ship around a meteor that should have been too close to avoid. There was nothing Ibanez couldn’t do with a starship, but none of that was her claim to fame.

When Rico and his Mobile Infantry unit were trapped on a planet, they needed a way off right freaking now. When Rico placed his request for extraction, they told him it was crazy to attempt to land where he needed his extraction from. His response was “I hope you have a crazy pilot.” That crazy pilot was Ibanez. She did got in there and got the job done when no one else could have. That’s why she’s Number Four.

Oh, and for the record, Starship Troopers the movie was better than the book. Fight me.

3.) Lieutenant Tom Paris - Star Trek Voyager

Paris stole a shuttle and managed to outrun the Kazon he stole it from - and they had a starship. He flew well enough to avoid the Borg on more than one occasion. He once escaped form a living nebula that wanted to eat his ship. When his shuttlecraft weren’t up to par, he invented a new one just so he could fly it, but let’s not forget his most important achievement.

Paris broke the Warp 10 Barrier. He managed to be everywhere in the universe all at once and still find his way home. Then he shagged his captain in reptile form. Yeah, that episode sucked, but breaking the Warp 10 Barrier was an amazing achievement. That achievement alone would land Thomas Eugene Paris in my top three. The rest is just gravy.

2.) Han Solo - Star Wars

Han Solo and his ship, the Millennium Falcon, made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs. That’s pretty impressive in and of itself. But for an encore Solo ran Imperial blockades, braved a meteor belt, dodged the disjointed chunks of Alderaan, managed to avoid the teeth of a giant space worm AFTER he was inside of it, and escaped from the Empire by playing possum and looking like a piece of the trash they had just jettisoned AFTER attaching the Falcon to the hull of the selfsame ship to avoid detection. And that all ignores the fact that Solo was the guy who saved Luke Skywalker’s bacon on a run through the trench on the Death Star.

Seriously, if I need someone to pilot a ship to save my life, I’m going with Hikaru Sulu. If I need someone to pilot a ship to save my kid’s lives I’m going with Han Solo. I wouldn’t tell him the odds of his success but I wouldn’t need to. He’s just crazy enough to try and borderline sane enough to succeed. You can’t beat that mix and that’s why Han Solo is Number Two on the list.

1.) Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu - Star Trek: The Original Series

I can hear all of you out there. “Jimbo picked Sulu because he grew up WATCHING Sulu at a time when Star Trek was really the only show on TV that had someone piloting a spacecraft.” Yeah, maybe. I bite my thumb at thee anyway. Sulu is, and always will be, the archetypical starship helmsman to me. That’s just life. Accept it.

The fact remains that this guy went heads up with Klingons and Romulans. He followed Jim Kirk’s cavalier, some might even say reckless, orders and got his ship and everyone in it not wearing a red shirt home afterword. Sulu also flew a freaking Klingon Bird of Prey back in time, and then flew back to his century with two whales in the hull. Beat that! Better yet, don’t. That ship was a rattletrap piece of trash. That much alone would make Sulu Number One on the list.

So there you have it, the Top Ten Pilots in Science Fiction. The comments are down there if you want to add to what’s here. I look forward to it.