Top ace of the calendar year

[Knusel]

Good morning Gentlemen,

this list shows the top aces of all calendar years in which aces scored 5+ official victories. Enjoy !
I wish I knew the decimals of the shared kills of Gritsevets.

Year / Top ace of the calendar year / victories
1915 Max Immelmann & Lanoe Hawker 7
1916 Oswald Boelcke 34
1917 Manfred von Richthofen 48
1918 René Fonck 56

1936 Joaquin Garcia-Morato 15,5
1937 Joaquin Garcia-Morato 13
1938 Werner Mölders & Tetsuzo Iwamoto 14 and/or Sergei Gritsevets 6+24
1939 Hiromichi Shinohara 58
1940 Adolf Galland 58
1941 Günther Lützow 83
1942 Hermann Graf 160
1943 Walter Nowotny 194
1944 Erich Hartmann 172
1945 Walther Dahl 43

1950 Stepan Naumenko & Li Don Gu 5
1951 Nikolai Sutyagin 19
1952 Frederick Blesse 10
1953 Joseph McConnel 16

1967 Nguyen Van Coc 6

1970 Abraham Shalmon 5,5

1972 Richard Ritchie & Randolph Cunningham 5
1973 Giora Epstein 12

1982 Amir Nahumi 6

Cheers,

Michael

[Pips]

Fascinating. Thanks.

[VtwinVince]

Very interesting. The only one to do it in consecutive years was during the Spanish Civil War.

[Knusel]

Apropos Spanish Civil War: Can you tell me the decimals of the shared kills of Gritsevets ?

Michael

P.S.: I just learned that Hartmann has 177 kills in 1944, not 172.

[Knusel]

Update: Gritsevets scored 7+24sh in 1938; Galland scored 57 in 1940.

Michael

[Barrett]

That's a lot of spadework--thank you for sharing. I compiled the 1915 and 16 scores for a semi-recent Flight Journal article (1916: Year of the Ace) but of course noted the difference in scoring systems.

[Frank_Olynyk]

1972 -- Cunningham's name is Randall, not Randolph.

Enjoy!

Frank.

[Knusel]

Good morning Frank,

you're right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham
Thanks for the hint.

Michael

[Airshipped]

Fascinating list. I quite agree with the inclusion for Amir Nachumi in 1982: the Israelis definitely scored the aerial victories in air-to-air combat whereas the Iranian examples of that year are sometimes a combination of the overall defence systems, e.g. SAM kill from Iraqi fleeing, fuel starvation, or being shepherded onto SAM killboxes etc.

For what it's worth, some Iranians are credited with 2-3 kills in 1982 by Tom Cooper, a quite reliable source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...%80%93Iraq_war

However, it's something of a digression from WWI.

[Knusel]

Hello Airshipped,

thanks for this link. This wikipedia article seems to be recently updated.
Yadollah Sharifirad might be a year 1980 top ace if we acknowledge his last two claims.
However, they might be unconfirmed:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131017..._victoires.php
Who knows more about that ?

Michael