able to produce final printed manuals for the fighter’s systems. Instead, we were issued loose pages, most of which had to be carefully hand-corrected to incorporate the latest equipment modifications and performance information from flight-test data. It was hard, painstaking work, but all of us had a sense of being involved in a revolutionary endeavor. The more we learned about the MiG-29, the more we realized the colonel delivering that orientation lecture had been understating, not exaggerating, the plane’s potential.
Then late on our second Friday afternoon, my group was escorted by armed guards to a nondescript inflatable hangar near the main Lipetsk flight line for the first personal inspection of the new fighter.
My first impression on entering the nylon igloo of the hangar was of the fighter’s lean, sculpted contours. I went forward to stroke the cool gray alloy panels of the lifting fuselage and the thin swept wings. Although the MiG-29 was slightly longer than the MiG-23 Crocodile, the new fighter was much less chunky. On the ground the Crocodile was a clumsy brute. Even in this small hangar, the MiG-29 appeared powerfully agile, fluid, yet deadly.
I passed around the left wing and inspected the sweeping blade of the one-piece powered stabilizer. These big horizontal tail surfaces were half as wide as the wings. And they could swing through an unusually wide deflection arc above and below the horizontal. Melding such powerful control surfaces with the massive thrust of the two turbofans would produce unprecedented maneuverability. Each of the twin raked vertical tails supported a large one-piece slab rudder, made of composite honeycomb material, that extended beyond the fin’s trailing edge, again evoking sensitive flight-control response. I was surprised at the thin airfoil sections of the wings and tail surfaces. These new alloys looked flimsy, but were stronger than steel.
My hand rested on the cold segments of the left engine’s afterburner nozzle, which consisted of an inner and outer ring of tapered alloy sections.
“This is a two-chamber bypass system,” a maintenance officer told me. “You can fly on maximum afterburner safely with no fear of nozzle overheating.” These engines delivered more thrust and better fuel consumption.
The maintenance officer showed me the engine air inlets that were protected by hinged, folding metal screens that dropped down the moment there was pressure on the landing gear struts.
“On taxi and takeoff,” he said, “the engines are protected from ingesting debris, like ice or gravel.”
Obviously this meant the new fighters could be safely flown from dispersed forward airstrips. With these protective doors in place, the engines breathed through the big louvered “shark gills” beside the fuselage on the upper wing surfaces.
At the nose I stared up at the clear-glass dome of the IRST sensor, which shielded the smaller shiny black globe inside, the actual sensor head. It was cooled by liquid nitrogen and was reportedly accurate for search, track, and lock-on out to a range of over fifteen miles. When coupled with the look-down pulse-Doppler radar, I realized, the IRST gave the pilot a choice of sensor options not yet available in several advanced Western fighters. NATO fighters like the F-16 or Mirage F-l lacked this dual sensor system, and relied instead on target acquisition from airborne radar planes like the American AWACS. That was all well and good in peacetime, when the AWACS could orbit unmolested up at 35,000 feet with its huge antenna sweeping the battlefield far beyond the horizon. But in war, one well-placed missile would blind the AWACS, and the Western planes would have to resort to their own radars, which would reveal their positions on our radar-warning receivers.
“How easy is all this electronic gear to work on?” I asked the maintenance captain.
He grinned, and pointed at an electronic diagnostic cart coupled to the fighter by a single green cable. “That computer checks every system after each flight. This is a very easy plane to service. If I have the right mechanics, I can change an engine in thirty minutes.”
Intelligence had taught us that it took top American ground crews a full hour to change an engine on an F- 15.
I waited my turn to climb the orange steel ladder to the open cockpit. When I sat on the surprisingly comfortable K-36D ejection seat, I felt like a king on a throne. This new fighter had been designed with a combat pilot in mind. Perched out here high on the nose, the view was unobstructed back past each wingtip. The instrument panel was dull gray with white instrument lights, unlike the MiG-23’s green panel that had dim red lights, which were hard to read. And the clear Plexiglas HUD was well placed and did not block my view forward. My hands automatically went to throttle and stick, where they would be in a dogfight. Even in this cramped temporary hangar, I could sense how the plane would feel alive, in its natural environment, the sky. I was impatient to fly this splendid new fighter.
My group’s classroom orientation lasted most of December. And we only made it back to our bases in Georgia a day or so before the New Year’s holiday. But I had not minded the tedious hours with the engineering manuals. I was now firmly convinced that my country’s full scientific and technical potential had been brought together in a combat aircraft. The MiG-29 was not a compromise born of political intrigue or Moscow cronyism. It was a weapon equal to anything in the Western inventory.
But I would have to swallow my impatience to fly the new fighter. The regiment then forming around my original cadre of officers would not receive their first aircraft for several months. In the interim I had two obligations to fill. First I had to complete my mandatory forty-five days’ annual leave off flight status. Then, I hoped, I would have time to finish my qualification training for my First Class pilot rating. Before leaving Lipetsk, I had stood in line for an hour to buy a nice New Year’s tree to bring back to Tskhakaya. Pine trees were a novelty in Georgia. I planned to host a large party for my friends in the regiment. This might be the last time I saw them for a long time. They were going to Afghanistan, and I was to be transferred to the MiG-29 unit.
On January 5, 1985, I flew Aeroflot to Mineralnyye Vody and took an Army bus for the Ministry of Defense ski resort at Terskol on the slopes of Mount Elbrus. The Air Force ordered that I would forget about flying and devote myself to skiing through the deep powder snow and cedar groves on the steep slopes of that huge extinct volcano. The implication was that I was to relax completely. This I certainly intended to do.
But then when I returned to Vaziani, I would have to throw myself fully back into my qualification training. If I didn’t make my First Class rating before transfer to the new MiG-29 regiment, I would have to repeat a lot of the tedious training that I had already sweated through at Vaziani. And I knew the new unit would be too busy qualifying pilots on the MiG-29 to devote aircraft and instructors to me. I either had to make my grade before leaving Vaziani or be stuck as a Second Class pilot for the indefinite future.
I was tucked into a comfortable seat on the well-heated Defense Ministry bus, chugging slowly up the icy switchback roads toward the white dome of Elbrus. I had a reservation at the Terskol resort hotel and a canister of good Armenian cognac in my duffel on the luggage rack. Since coming to Georgia, I’d learned that cognac was as valuable as hard currency. A liter of Armenian cognac cost me five rubles when I dealt with a certain unofficial “Socialist Enterprise': an acquaintance named Otar — an amiable Georgian with a pirate’s mustache — who had family connections in Armenia. The same high-quality cognac in the State liquor store cost fifteen rubles, and was almost unobtainable in the Russian Republic.
I had spent part of my annual leave here at Terskol the previous winter, and had learned how to ski the hard way, after accidentally taking a lift to the top of an expert run on the mountain’s eastern shoulder. After a couple near-fatal falls, I stopped to “adjust my bindings,” when a pretty girl took pity and showed me how to escape the dangerous slope by riding the chairlift back to the bottom.
My first year at Terskol I had also made friends with three interesting young fellows who would join me on this vacation. When I had met them in the men’s dormitory of the resort the year before, they’d explained they were students. One of them was an ethnic Abkhas named Zaour. His tall friend Oleg was from Sochi with the precise diction of a television announcer. Vladimir, who appeared in his mid-twenties, was a Russian born in Georgia, but he spoke with a slight Baltic accent, as if one of his parents might have been Latvian or Estonian. They originally had a cramped, cold attic in the hotel annex, and I managed to get them into my bigger room, which we soon took over as our private domain. I had managed to bring three liters of cognac on my first ski vacation. Vladimir had a Toshiba stereo and a good assortment of Western rock cassettes. Zaour came equipped with a huge sack of oranges. Soon we had a nonstop party running every evening when the lifts closed. Oleg called it our “apres ski” classes.
And the girls from Moscow Medical Institute and the professional schools in Georgia certainly seemed to enjoy the lessons.
When the bus dropped me at the snowy steps of the Terskol resort, Oleg, Zaour, and Vladimir were already there, all grinning broadly. It seemed that the resort’s equipment manager, another Abkhas named Hamid, had been able to reserve us a pair of comfortable two-bed rooms which opened into a suite. The liter of cognac I’d given
