condoms and a handkerchief for every weekend pass. They were supposed to use the handkerchief to blow their nose to show they were gentlemen. But I knew there wouldn’t be much time to use up my condoms. And I also realized it was prudent to get to know a town better before seriously chasing after the local women. Many of them had more than just sex on their minds. In some cities, girls ran a clever racket. They’d meet a pilot at a local dance, encourage him to drink heavily, then invite him back to their room. When the fellow woke up early the next morning, he was always in a hurry to return to his base. Then he would discover that his Communist Party card and military identity papers, embossed with gilded missiles and comets, were missing. The girl would offer to organize a search for these precious documents. Sometimes the “bonus” required for the return of the papers went as high as 750 rubles. They knew what our salaries were and how much they could squeeze out of us.
Even the senior staff officers in our group did not know much about the MiG-29 before we got to Lipetsk. The new aircraft had a definitely mysterious aura, which angered many of us. We knew that the MiG-29 had already been discussed in Western military journals, but we pilots who would have to quickly master its complexities had been told absolutely nothing about the new fighter. This was more of the same old rigid secrecy that had hamstrung the Soviet military in many ways. It was a sad state of affairs if Moscow couldn’t even trust us with some hint about the new MiG fighter.
At Vaziani a friend of mine had brought back some photocopies of Western technical publications, which had vague artist’s sketches of the new fighter. These sketches confirmed our expectations: The MiG-29’s configuration followed the same pattern as similar fighters being developed in the West. Like the American F-15 and the F-18, the MiG-29 pictured was a two-engine fighter with twin vertical tail fins.
In my first year at Armavir, Alexander Fedotov from the Mikoyan Design Bureau had briefed us on the new generation of aircraft. But all he had told us was that the new MiG and Sukhoi fighters “will be just as good as the Americans’ F-15 and F-16.”
From reading the Soviet publication Foreign Military Review, I knew that future combat fighters would be powered by reliable twin afterburning turbofan engines that needed gaping, low-slung air intakes. To operate at the extreme ends of the flight envelope — slow and low, and high Mach at high altitude — these new aircraft would combine a sculpted, lift-generating fuselage with thin wings that were only slightly swept. Twin vertical tail fins and large one-piece horizontal tail stabilizers were the logical solution to highly maneuverable flight control across the entire envelope. It was no wonder that all these modern combat planes — Soviet and Western — had a similar configuration.
But Soviet combat aviation doctrine was almost exactly the opposite of the NATO air forces. We did not have a global chain of modern bases. Our Frontal Aviation regiments operated from relatively primitive bases like Tskhakaya and Vaziani, each with a single large runway and simple maintenance facilities. The Soviet military was not a primarily volunteer force like those in the West. We did not have a limitless supply of technically talented young career sergeants to maintain our planes in the field. Many of the conscript mechanics I’d worked with could barely read Russian and had to be taught their tasks with the rote techniques you’d use with a child. Kolkhozniki with the cow manure of the State farms still wet on their boots could not be expected to repair radars and fire- control computers like their American counterparts, who had grown up with their own cars and — we heard on the Voice of America — their own home computers. Instead, we relied on a small cadre of professional maintenance officers trained in academies, supplemented by praporshchiki, warrant officers who could keep the conscript mechanics from destroying the planes.
Our military planners also faced another challenge when they wrote the design requirements for new Soviet aircraft. The Great Patriotic War had taught us an extremely valuable lesson: the tactic of offensive and defensive zasada, ambush. To survive, combat aircraft had to be dispersed as widely as possible — often to simple airstrips with steel matting or even roads for runways and no electrical power or maintenance hangars. In June 1941 the Nazi Luftwaffe had destroyed both the PVO and the VVS on the parking aprons of their elaborate bases in Byelorussia and the Ukraine. After that, we’d learned to disperse down to primitive grass strips, often hiding our aircraft in stands of birch and maple trees.
You couldn’t fly a modern combat jet off a muddy grass strip, of course. But we built our modern planes to operate in conditions almost as primitive. If a regiment was using a potholed highway as an emergency dispersal strip, the pilots were even instructed exactly how much to reduce the air pressure in their tires. Soviet fighters also had to be simple, reliable, and robust — “soldier-proof.” We planned to counter the Western lead in precision-guided weapons by spreading our assets thinly across our vast territory. I had seen plans for training exercises in the Far East, for example, where MiG-23 regiments would disperse down to squadron or even zveno level and operate off steel-mat strips, supported only by a small convoy of fuel and ordnance trucks. All Soviet combat planes could start engines with their own internal battery and be rearmed by a pair of mechanics working with simple tools.
So all of us who arrived at the Lipetsk training center understood that the MiG-29 would combine some design features shared in common with Western planes. But we also knew that the new fighter would have to meet our particular Soviet requirements. And we all expected that the airplane would combine both unprecedented thrust and maneuverability.
When my friend Pashka Goleitszin read in a European aviation magazine that the Mikoyan OKB had simply “plagiarized” Western designers in the configuration of the MiG-29, he exploded in indignation.
“Those damned capitalists,” he yelled. “Who do they think we are, a bunch of ignorant Mongols? We’ve been building fighters for seventy years.”
Pashka was an avid patriot, and what he said was certainly true, but I knew that the long conflict between the Soviet Union and its enemies, in both the East and the West, had reached a critical stage. Where we had been able to employ minimal technology in large numbers in the past, we now faced a critical advanced-technology challenge in the new generations of Western aircraft.
NATO had already assigned the MiG-29 the code name “Fulcrum,” tochka opori. Most VVS pilots were pleasantly amused by the NATO designations for our aircraft: “Fishbed” for the MiG-21, “Flogger” for the MiG-23, and all the others. These English words had an exotic sound in Russian, and it made nicknames to the fighters a lot easier. But I especially liked Fulcrum. It was pure coincidence, of course, but the new fighter did represent a pivotal point in Soviet aircraft design. Either we were going to meet the Western technology challenge, or we would slip into the status of a second-class military power. And I knew our leaders would never allow that to happen, no matter what sacrifice was required.
Even before we received our first briefing at Lipetsk on the new MiG-29, I had learned something of its capabilities, which were developed to meet this new Western threat. During the air war in Vietnam, the Americans had lost hundreds of fighter-bombers to the Soviet air-defense system the PVO had installed and managed in North Vietnam. The combination of radar-controlled high- and medium-altitude surface-to-air missiles deployed in dense concentric circles around important targets — the same system we used in Soviet territory — had forced the Americans to adopt new tactics. They had learned to fly under our radar in small dispersed formations, which arrived on different headings simultaneously at important targets in order to saturate the defense forces. Since then, they had applied the same logic to their attack plans against Soviet forces. Current American and NATO doctrine called for multiple low-altitude strike “packages” flying below the radar horizon.
Their fighter-bombers and new cruise missiles all employed this tactic, as did their large strategic bombers. This would neutralize our air-defense missiles and effectively counter the old PVO GCI defense in which interceptors with relatively weak on-board radar would be strictly vectored to their targets by radar controllers on the ground. Our battle management officers could not spot F-16s or NATO Tornados streaking along at transonic speed just above the treetops. And interceptors like the Su-15 or the MiG-23 lacked the radar detection or fire control to shoot down such intruders. Traditional mono-pulse airborne radar could not detect a low-level aircraft against the clutter of the ground below. And at low altitude, passive jamming with chaff — ultra-thin hairlike strips of aluminum foil — could make a plane invisible to radar. Only pulse-Doppler radar, which detected relative motion, was capable of managing the so-called “look-down, shoot-down” fire-control system. But this radar depended on sophisticated computers, a technology that our designers had managed to avoid dependence on until now. The MiG-29 reportedly had this radar.
Naturally I was eager to see the new airplane firsthand. The winter cold and blizzards, however, had closed down the Lipetsk test-flight lines, so I didn’t even glimpse the new fighter during the first week of intense classroom orientation.
Our instructors immediately made it clear that the MiG-29 was a revolutionary departure from traditional Soviet aircraft design. And production models of the new fighter were being built and delivered to combat regiments
