up and she informed on him. The Osobii Otdel at Armavir launched a full-blown investigation. Sergei was dismissed from the MiG-23 program and almost landed in prison.
During the October leave between my second and third years at Armavir, I was able to visit Leningrad, having saved money by working an unofficial night job in the city. Soviet factory managers were always looking for men eager to perform unpleasant work for high wages. My friends and I contacted the manager of a textile factory near the academy that produced the cotton wadding for quilted winter garments. Our job was to climb inside the huge ventilation conduits and clean the matted lint from the filters. We used our Army gas masks to protect our lungs. It was nasty work, but paid fifteen rubles a night, and the academy never knew about it.
It was common practice for greedy faculty members to barter cadets’ labor for their own gain. Major Zheloudkov, my battalion commander, was one of the worst offenders.
“Well, comrades,” he would say, “we need materials to refurbish our Lenin Rooms.”
There was nothing wrong with the wall paneling or bookcases in the Lenin Rooms, but Zheloudkov had promised a local furniture company to supply cadets for weekend work in exchange for all the material he needed to refurbish his own dacha outside the city. He never roped me into that flunky work because I represented the academy on the Spartak wrestling circuit, and the major was a great sports fan.
In June 1981 we finally completed our formal MiG-23 ground school and sweated through our theoretical exams. My flight instructor was Captain Vladimir Bogorotsky, a typical no-nonsense Air Force instructor, very businesslike and direct. I found him rather humorless, but completely honest and dedicated to his job. It was not surprising that he was the Communist Party secretary of his instructors’ kollectiv.
Bogorotsky’s crew consisted of five cadets. Lapwing Siskin and I were in the first echelon. Deep Freeze had the second echelon to himself. And Misha Soutormin and Anatoli Sarichev formed the third echelon of the crew. With our strong academic background and good record on the L-29, we were probably the best-prepared crew at the academy.
We had worked hard on MiG-23 cockpit simulators, and were completely familiar with the complexities of the afterburning engine, hydraulic wing-sweep control, pulse radar, and infrared search and track system (IRST). But the only way we would truly understand the new aircraft was to fly it.
Our first instruction was in the MiG-23UB, the uchybno boyevoy, a two-seat combat trainer version of the aircraft. As in all Soviet trainers, the instructor sat behind the student, both a reassuring presence and a reminder to the guy in the front seat to pay attention to business.
Our new G-suits had larger constricting inflatable air bladders on our thighs and abdomen to protect us more effectively from blackout during maneuvers than our L-29 suits had. This was good news because we’d been told our testicles could be damaged during high-G turns and banks. But cadets also believed that pulling a certain amount of Gs made you a better lover because your blood pooled in the “vital organs” of the lower body. The new KM-1 ejection seat was more powerful than the L-29’s, and had a powerful, solid-fuel rocket that could save your life at zero altitude in the event of a flameout on takeoff. The instrument panel of the MiG-23 was crowded with electronics, including a radar sight for the 23mm GSh cannon-pod, air-to-air missiles, and a weapons-release panel for bombs and ground-attack rockets. The cockpit also had a Sirena 3-M radar-threat warning system and a SRZO Information Friend or Foe radar-interrogation system. And the TP-23 IRST actually displayed data on a clear Plexi- glas head-up display (HUD) above the instrument panel.
If these complexities were not enough, management of the afterburning R-29 turbofan was a demanding task. An afterburner, we learned, could virtually transform the aircraft into a piloted rocket. But learning to control the variable-geometry wings through all the power-setting regimes of the flight envelope proved incredibly difficult for some students, even during ground school. The wings had to be swept back at least thirty-three degrees for transonic flight, but forty-five degrees was the standard setting. If you forgot this requirement and accelerated to 0.8 or 0.95 Mach in the denser air below 9,000 feet with your wings unswept, a sudden, dangerous “overswing” could occur, which caused rapid, alternating negative and positive Gs. The plane quickly became uncontrollable. In 1980 an instructor and student from Armavir were killed in just such a sudden overswing accident.
Naturally, for high-Mach flight, the full-rear wing sweep was necessary. This meant we had to learn to handle the throttle, the wing-sweep hydraulic lever beneath the throttle quadrant, and the control stick simultaneously — while also using the weapons system electronics and the radio. And, of course, the wing had to be in the full-forward position for landing. Clearly, even some of my group of fifty talented L-29 pilots were not yet up to this challenge.
Captain Bogorotsky believed in long flying days while the weather was good. Within two weeks I was handling my own takeoffs and landings. The takeoffs were no problem because of the generous lift of the upswept wings and the powerful engines. But landing the MiG-23 was never easy. The landing airspeed was high, 140 knots, much faster than the L-29. So you had to judge your flare altitude and speed on the landing threshold with precision. If you landed with too much airspeed, you might experience a dangerous condition known as the “progressive goat.”
The overly springy landing gear exacerbated this problem. In any aircraft the actual flare maneuver was a near stall. But if you flared too fast and slammed down your nose gear, the MiG-23 would bounce back into the air in a nose-high attitude, at which point the inexperienced pilot would instinctively jam the stick forward and bring the nose gear back down to the runway. This was the start of the “goat.” The nosewheel would slam down hard, and the aircraft would bounce again, this time higher, with the nose pitched even more steeply. The bounce and pitch back would progress, with the nose dropping and bouncing back more sharply on each cycle. By the fifth bounce, the tail keel would drag, killing the last of the airspeed. The plane would stall off on one wing, fall onto its belly, and explode. And, unfortunately, even our advanced ejection seat would not save a pilot at zero airspeed.
We read accident reports of both Soviet and foreign students, Cubans, Angolans, and North Koreans, who all experienced a progressive goat landing. Several of them had been killed. I was determined to avoid this potential trap.
I soloed in the MiG-23 on September 15, 1981. This was quite an accomplishment, considering I had been grounded for one month that summer as punishment for being caught in town, AWOL in civilian clothes. If I hadn’t been in the advanced MiG-23 program, I probably would have done time in the guardhouse. But my deputy squadron commander, Major Nurokmiyetov, knew that, for me, being grounded was worse punishment than being chased by the guardhouse dogs. When I turned in the rags I had substituted for my real clandestine set of civvies, the major shook his head, realizing he had been taken. He had seen me in town before, but ignored the infraction because I was dating the daughter of his former flight instructor. Now he had to follow regulations and confiscate my civvies. “I’ll never believe that you actually wore this shit,” he said, fingering the old tennis shoes and warm-up suit I surrendered. My first American “Levi’s” jeans and nice shirt were safely hidden at the apartment.
After I soloed on the MiG-23, my attitude toward life in the Air Force changed. I was twenty years old and had been given the responsibility of flying this powerful combat aircraft. We flew now several times a week and spent long hours in the classroom studying basic individual and formation air-combat tactics, designed to prepare us to counter known NATO combat maneuvers such as “yo-yo” ambushes from high or low altitude and high-G barrel- roll attacks.
At this time, several of my friends became candidate members of the Communist Party, a mandatory apprenticeship of at least one year before they could be considered for full membership. If you were a candidate, you had to watch your behavior; reprimands or a stretch in the guardhouse could kill your chances for Party membership, which, in turn, could stifle your career as an officer. I preferred to wait until after graduation to become a candidate member. That way I could still take chances sneaking off to town to see girls, and all I risked was the guardhouse.
Over the next year I mastered the Crocodile. While some cadets were still dreading every landing approach, I and a few others were practicing instrument-landing-system approaches. As I had anticipated, the members of my crew were near the top of our class. We had all conquered the terrible goat by learning to judge our flare attitude accurately before chopping the throttle.
During our combat training in 1982, we learned to fly with a wingman in a para two-plane formation. We all knew where this training was leading us. The war in Afghanistan had become a protracted test of wills between the Soviet Union and the imperialists — treacherously supported by the Chinese. When we graduated in October, we would probably be sent to an advanced combat-training regiment and then on to Afghanistan. So we concentrated on the deadly serious and complex business of flying a high-performance aircraft. My earlier romantic illusions about
