What is it like to fly a jet fighter
If you want a condensed answer FlareAngel, then just gaze at the image posted by Lightning_Mate.
Arguably it was in a class of its own.
There have been a fair number of jet fighters manufactured and very few of them were unmatched in their day. The Gnat, for example, not the trainer used by the RAF but the fighter used by the Indians; the sublime Hunter; the Viggen, all of them would make their pilots tingle, and people with their feet on the ground stop and stare.
The Lightning though somehow got in to your very bones and remained there.
What is it like to fly? It is like anything else that makes your heart dance, that makes your brain fizz, that makes your vocabulary obsolete, like anything else that sears itself into every morsel of you, that haunts you, that challenges you, that stretches you further than you thought you could stretch — and also hurls you, with a thumping twirling exhilarating explosion of power and technology into a dimension that for nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people is a matter of seat spacing, in-flight videos and the risk of blood clots from not moving for hours.
I think the 'jet' is superfluous. If you attached sensors to the brain, the heart, the soul of a Sopwith Pup pilot, a Hawker Fury pilot, a Spitfire pilot, a Lightning pilot, a Viggen pilot, a Mig-21 pilot, a Rafale pilot, a Typhoon pilot I suspect you would find very similar reactions.
Because it is not the aircraft, it is being a fighter pilot that matters.