day, even if that was the only chance they had to buy scarce necessities. My mother told me that workers at her institute were encouraged to report anyone arriving even two minutes late. I felt great satisfaction at watching these events unfold. Andropov was exactly the kind of leader we needed: tough, practical, and resourceful. I knew from my own experience that the Socialist system rewarded those who worked hard. I had sworn to defend that system, with my very life if necessary. And I wanted everyone else to show the same level of dedication.
By order of the chief of staff of the VVS, all new lieutenants had to qualify as Third Class pilots within one year. This meant we had to work harder than Colonel Homenko could have ever imagined possible.
Our maneuver training circuits and weapons poligons — rectangular bomb, missile, and cannon firing ranges — were close enough to the Ruslan base that we could fly three or four sorties a day and at least two each night we trained. Ruslan lay in the middle of the flat Rioni delta, less than thirty miles from the coast, equidistant from the Great Caucasus to the north and the Maliy Kavkaz mountains to the south.
After our initial jet training in the L-29, the complex attributes of the MiG-23 combined to produce a seemingly sophisticated airplane. In effect, we had to learn three completely different sets of aerodynamic limits with their accompanying power-setting and angle-of-attack restrictions. The plane would behave one way at low speed with unswept wings and completely differently at another wing angle and throttle position.
At Ruslan I learned how this flawed design had been accepted as one of the Air Force’s first-rank combat aircraft. Apparently Marshal Pavel Kutakhov, the Air Force commander in chief, was a close friend of Brezhnev’s. Kutakhov was also a crony of the heads of the Mikoyan Design Bureau. The marshal convinced Brezhnev to accept the bureau’s new aircraft without submitting the design to a very rigorous competition among the combat aircraft OKBs, Mikoyan, Sukhoi, and Yakovlev. So the Air Force received thousands of MiG-23s, a design with many strong points, but one whose flaws had not been “wrung out” in competition.
Unfortunately the Sukhoi Design Bureau, which had done brilliant work during the war, fell out of favor in the late 1940s. Stalin was influenced by Anastasi Mikoyan, his foreign minister, and the brother of the Mikoyan OKB chief, Artem. The Sukhoi bureau was disbanded and its brilliant, forward-thinking designers and engineers dispersed throughout the Soviet Union. The Mikoyan OKB was now top dog in Moscow. Although their MiG-15 and MiG-21 were well-conceived and innovative aircraft for their time, the bureau lacked the vision of Sukhoi. Instead, they relied on political connections and pokazuka to push through their MiG-23 design.
Short-landing capability was one of the new aircraft’s main requirements. The Mikoyan test pilots demonstrated this by a crude ploy. With PVO and VVS generals assembled at the test center, a demonstration pilot flared a prototype for landing and popped his drag chute with his wheels still three feet above the runway. Naturally the plane’s landing roll was short. But the generals did not notice that the prototype had blown all three tires and damaged its gear. They were so impressed that they actually commented that the new aircraft should be considered a possible candidate for an aircraft carrier fighter.
As we trained that spring and summer on the Ruslan ranges, I had to constantly keep all of the aircraft’s sensitive characteristics in mind. One afternoon of blustery showers when there was a fluky crosswind blowing on the active landing runway, I executed a missed approach only ten seconds from flareout. I rammed the throttle ahead to full military power, raised the gear and flaps, and climbed away.
“Bird,” I called the tower, indicating that I had seen birds flying across the runway. This had not been the case. But I had recognized that for some reason, I had been just too fast to land and risked provoking a goat. I went around the circuit and set up for landing again. Once I landed, Captain Shalunov, my link leader, met me on the apron.
“What’s going on, Sanya?” he asked. “I didn’t see any flocks of birds out there.”
I was stowing my helmet and oxygen mask in my flight bag and collecting my tactical navigation charts. I rose to face him. “Comrade Captain,” I admitted, “for some reason I just felt that approach was not safe.”
Instead of a reprimand, Shalunov smiled and slapped me on the shoulder. “Good job,” he said. “Never forget, caution is not fear.”
Even though the MiG-23 was a bastard of an airplane to master, I qualified as a Third Class pilot on the aircraft in August 1983. Our training shifted to Karachala, an isolated base in Azerbaijan. I had managed to rack up a full year’s worth of sorties in only eight months.
After qualifying, we began to fly at night. I had no particular problem with the disorientation that can sometimes lead to hazardous vertigo, which afflicted some of the junior pilots during their early night flying. Again I was fortunate in having excellent instructors. Captain Shalunov helped me build on the skills that I had learned from Lieutenant Tveretin and Captain Bogorotsky. And, as always, I kept my own personal flight logbook in which I emphasized my shortcomings.
Then the Soviet military was rocked by a scandal of unprecedented scale. On September 1, 1983, a PVO Su- 15 interceptor shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 jumbo jet with 269 people on board over the Sea of Okhotsk between the Soviet Union’s Sakhalin Island and the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. There were no survivors. The plane had been en route to Seoul from New York with a layoveayover in Anchorage, Alaska. A number of important Americans, including a congressman, were among those killed.
Pr01 and the Vremya news broadcast from Moscow television stressed that the airliner had flown straight into Soviet airspace above sensitive defense installations and was flying in darkness without aerial navigation lights. According to Moscow, the Korean pilot also refused to respond to repeated warnings from both civilian and military Soviet air traffic controllers.
Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the deputy defense minister who had tried to undercut the PVO in his reforms of the early 1980s, was now given the task of publicly defending the Air Defense Force. Ogarkov led an unprecedented internationally televised press conference at the Kremlin, which continued the same condemnation of the Korean pilot initiated by Pravda. Ogarkov’s explanation for the Korean pilot’s strange behavior was that the South Korean airliner might have been working in conjunction with an American Air Force RC-135 electronic spy plane. He stressed that the PVO radars had tracked the intruder all the way south from the heavily defended Kamchatka Peninsula, hundreds of miles to the north. The marshal used elaborate graphs and charts to demonstrate that the airliner had penetrated deeply into sensitive Soviet airspace despite repeated warnings from Soviet ground controllers to turn away.
After the widely publicized appearance by Ogarkov, Dmitri Ustinov, the Soviet Defense Minister, angrily chastised both the Americans and South Koreans for having endangered the civilian passengers so recklessly.
Most of the pilots in my regiment accepted the official version of this unfortunate event. But as VVS officers, we were scornful of the PVO pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Osipovich, who had destroyed the airliner with two missiles. Osipovich’s Su-15 was a typical PVO interceptor, a fast-climbing, rather unmaneuverable fuel guzzler with a short combat radius. The Su-15 was little more than a high-altitude missile platform. Some of my older colleagues dismissed PVO interceptor pilots as “robots” because they slavishly followed the radar vectors and weapons-release commands of the GCI ground controllers. Apparently this was the case in the Korean airliner incident.
My own reaction was that Osipovich certainly had not done everything possible to protect both Soviet territory and innocent lives. Then I began to hear a starkly different version of the events over Sakhalin Island. The Defense Ministry announced that a second Su-15 and a VVS MiG-23 had also been scrambled and were trailing Osipovich when he shot down the airliner. In fact, my link leader, Captain Shalunov, actually recognized the MiG-23 pilot on television. The officer was a friend of his named Litvinov. The pilots in my squadron began to whisper that there was something wrong with the official explanation of the airliner shoot-down. Nobody believed that the Americans would jeopardize hundreds of innocent civilian passengers for a routine espionage gain. The VVS base was in the north of the island. If at least two Su-15s and one MiG-23 had been scrambled, why was the airliner destroyed south of Sakhalin Island?
Later we discovered the shocking truth. A GCI officer named Andrei, reassigned from Sakhalin Island, came to our regiment for a familiarization course. Over dinner one night, he revealed what really happened to the Korean airliner.
Ten days before the incident, Andrei said, an Arctic gale had knocked down the early warning radar antennas on the Kamchatka Peninsula, depriving eastern Siberia and Sakhalin Island of the “air picture” needed to vector interceptors against intruders. Moscow put incredible pressure on the PVO to repair these antennas immediately to regain air-defense coverage for the Soviet Far East. Finally Far East PVO officers reported to Moscow that the radars were up and running. But the antennas were still lying broken on the tundra.
When the Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace, it passed right over the strategic peninsula and on
