Up-Pointing Military Airplane was a community-suggested emoji concept discussed during the mid-2010s expansion of emoji sets, but it never became an officially approved Unicode emoji. The idea captured a modern fighter jet angled upward to suggest climbing, takeoff, or vertical acceleration. Supporters wanted it for aviation talk, military news, airshows, and flight-sim or arcade combat games, as well as a general metaphor for “powering up,” “escalation,” or “we’re taking off.” In internet culture it would have doubled as a hype marker, a way to signal rank-ups or boosts, and a shorthand for “Top Gun” moments.
Concept imagery and fan mockups typically showed a sleek gray or camouflaged jet with swept wings and a glass canopy, nose pitched 30–45 degrees, sometimes with a small afterburner flame or thin contrail. If it had shipped in Apple-style artwork, it likely would have used simple metallic gradients and omitted national insignia or visible weapons, while a Google/Material-style version would lean toward a clean silhouette. The candidate was often listed on community wishlists alongside names like “Fighter Jet” or “Warplane,” but it overlapped with existing Airplane, Small Airplane, and Rocket emojis and touched on sensitive war iconography. Those overlap and sensitivity issues, together with uncertain frequency-of-use data, are commonly cited reasons such ideas were not prioritized for encoding. As a result it never received a Unicode code point, and users typically emulate the concept by pairing ✈ or 🛩 with ⬆, or by using 🚀 to convey the same “going up fast” vibe.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
This emoji was one of the "suggested emojis" the Unicode group unveiled in June 2014 [article], however, it has been, and still is, up to the companies who support emoji in their operating systems to provide not only images but also an algorithm to replace the emoji code into the emoji image.
