ACE COMBAT 8: Joker Flight and the Endurance crew

What the publisher has published

ACE COMBAT 8 is built around a single flight. The publisher’s game page puts the player in a first-person campaign: a fighter pilot pulled from a rescue boat by the outdated carrier Endurance, given one name — “Wings of Theve” — and sent up with “three new comrades at your side”.

The announcement Bandai Namco Entertainment published on September 4, 2026 fills in those comrades. It introduces “the pilots of Joker Flight and the crew of the FCU Endurance: pilots, officers, and survivors who make up the last fighting force of a nation on the brink”, and describes four people in the flight plus the leader of a second one.

Everything on this page comes from that announcement, from the publisher’s European game overview, or from what the official store screenshots visibly show. Where a name, an age or a performer is missing, it is marked as missing rather than filled in.

The four aircraft of Joker Flight

Ranks and positions as published on September 4, 2026. The first row is the player’s role: the publisher’s game page gives the player the single name “Wings of Theve”, and the character announcement gives that same sign to the Commander who leads the flight. That pilot’s name is never printed.

The four fly as one unit under the player’s command. The European overview states that the squad can be ordered to concentrate on a single target, divide and conquer, cover the player, or clear special weapons — the in-game side of those commands is described on the controls and difficulty page.

The Endurance and its crew

The ship is part of this roster rather than scenery: the publisher introduces the flight and the crew of the carrier together, as the people “who make up the last fighting force of a nation on the brink”. The game page sets the scene — the player is “adrift at sea in a rescue boat until the outdated aircraft carrier, Endurance, pulls you aboard”, the FCU has “fallen under a lightning invasion by the Republic of Sotoa”, and the ship is “just one fragment of what remains”.

The European overview adds that some of the crew call the ship “the Old Lady”, and that it serves as the base of operations for the campaign’s missions: dogfights, air support for ground troops, and air-to-sea sorties against threats to the carrier.

What the publisher does not publish is a crew list. This page therefore records only the people the publisher actually describes, rather than assembling a full manifest from other sources. The setting itself, including the occupation of the FCU and the invented legend behind the player’s name, is covered on the story and setting page.

Queen Flight and the second flight

Joker Flight is not the only flight on the deck. The September 4 announcement also describes the leader of Queen Flight, which it calls “the carrier’s other flight”: a Lieutenant Commander, described as cool and collected and focused on protecting the pilots of both flights, who wears bandages constantly but never lets the strain show.

One further Queen Flight name appears only on screen, in the publisher’s own store screenshots, where a communications overlay identifies a pilot as C. Everson, “Queen Flight, No. 4”. That is recorded here as what an official screenshot shows, which is a weaker claim than a published character file — no announcement describes that pilot, and no full roster for either flight has been published.

The publisher gives no ages for any of these characters, no personnel numbers, and no indication of whether further aircrew will be introduced later. This page treats all of that as unpublished.

What the official screenshots show — and what they do not

The publisher’s store screenshots carry roster detail that no written announcement repeats. These are recorded as screen evidence, deliberately separate from the published descriptions above.

• A hangar sortie screen lists the player’s flight under the names REX, BAXTER, TASHA and COSTER, with an aircraft type beside each entry and a wingman aircraft selection option, which is why no fixed aircraft is claimed for any of them on this site.
• The carrier’s name, ENDURANCE, is printed in the heads-up display of a cockpit screenshot.
• A communications overlay names the second flight’s pilot as C. Everson, “Queen Flight, No. 4”.
• An enemy unit card identifies a hostile squadron as the LUX LUNAE 55th UNIT, with the unit line “1st Special Operations Wing, 11th Tactical Squadron”.
• A communications subtitle shows Joker 2 calling out “Heads up, Bandits spotted!”, with a character card identifying the speaker as Joker Flight No. 2.

Two conclusions follow from that material and one does not. The screenshots confirm that the flight’s four slots are labelled in game, and that a second flight and a named enemy squadron exist. They do not constitute a published roster: the enemy squadron appears only as an in-game card, and the meanings of individual on-screen labels are not explained by any announcement, so no interpretation is added here.

Cast, ages and what is not published

“ACE COMBAT 8 voice actors” and “ACE COMBAT 8 cast” are heavily searched, and the honest answer is thinner than the search volume suggests.

• Voice cast: not published on the sources checked here. The September 4 character announcement names no performers, and the official game page does not print a cast list. Third-party outlets report a Bandai Namco Asia voice-cast announcement naming performers in English and Japanese for several of these characters, but that is press reporting relayed by outlets, not a publisher page, so this site does not restate it as confirmed.
• Ages: not published. No official material checked gives an age, birthday or height for any member of Joker Flight or Queen Flight.
• The flight leader’s name: not published. The announcement describes him without printing a name, and this page does not supply one from elsewhere.
• A complete roster of either flight, and of the Endurance crew: not published. One Queen Flight pilot is named by a screenshot and its leader is described; the rest of both flights is unknown.
• Who ran the “manufactured ace project”: not published. The announcement says the pilot was selected for it and that the legend was not real; it does not say who ordered or wrote either.
• How the campaign ends, and whether any of these characters carry over from ACE COMBAT 7: not published. The announcement names no returning ACE COMBAT 7 characters.