State farms, and even joined the people on the street to offer encouragement about the bright future. In one widely broadcast embarrassing encounter, Gorbachev waded into a crowd of disgruntled workers in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, an industrial center, which unlike Lipetsk, had not managed to guarantee its supply of food at State subsidized prices. Several angry and frustrated men and women harangued Gorbachev about shortages and high prices.
Gorbachev shook his finger in their faces in mock reprimand. “You’re making such high salaries out here,” he told them, “that you’re buying too much food. There’s just too much buying going on for the supply to keep pace.”
The faces in the crowd stared at him with a mixture of amazement and disbelief. But the General Secretary merely grinned confidently and proceeded along the pavement, reaching out to shake hands with whomever he could touch.
When I watched that scene on the television in my squadron’s Lenin Room, I felt a sagging sensation. Just like all the other shishka, Mikhail Gorbachev seemed unable to see the reality around him.
Our new airplanes began to arrive in July. The first delivery flight was led by Boris Antonovich Orlov, one of the chief test pilots of the Mikoyan OKB. Orlov was a tall rangy man in his late forties with the chiseled features of a Moscow movie star. He looked every inch the test pilot. But we all knew there was much more to him than looks. He had earned one of the few legitimate Hero of the Soviet Union decorations for his long service developing new aircraft. In 1973 he had set a world time-to-altitude record of less than three minutes to 60,000 feet, which stood for over a decade.
Orlov addressed the regiment’s assembled pilots, speaking softly with slow precision. He knew we had all studied our aircraft system manuals and assured us that he would be available for individual consultations with every pilot before he attempted his first solo in the MiG-29.
“Comrades,” he said, “this is a beautiful airplane to fly. Even though you have no cockpit simulator yet, I’m confident you’ll have no problems.”
Orlov then climbed into the cockpit of his aircraft and strapped into his ejection seat prior to the demonstration flight. As I watched him, I was again taken by the powerful, fluid lines of the fighter. The louvered engine air inlets on the upper extended wingroots had the definite appearance of a shark’s gills. This airplane was a true predator.
We stood on the edge of the apron watching Orlov taxi the gray fighter to the end of the runway. Under his expert touch, the plane seemed to move quite nimbly on the ground. As soon as he swung onto the centerline of runway 09, Orlov lit the afterburners and the fighter sprang ahead as if on an invisible catapult.
Like the men around me, I was counting silently, “One, two, three…”
The throaty rumble of the afterburners seemed smoother than the roar of other fighters. There was no rasping, crackling edge to the noise, just pure power.
“Blyakha Mukha!” the man beside me exclaimed. “Wow!” In less than six seconds, Orlov had rotated the nose and was climbing away at a steep angle, the afterburners glowing bright orange. The takeoff roll had been only 900 feet. As he climbed, the fighter’s nose rose to the vertical, then past it. He topped off his takeoff loop at only 3,000 feet and was diving vertically toward the runway. We all cringed instinctively as Orlov seemed to delay his pullout far past the safety margin. But then the gray fighter snapped out of the dive and roared past us at an altitude of 300 feet, straight and level on military power.
Just as the fighter passed our position, Orlov lit the burners again and rotated the nose straight up. He climbed in the vertical, relying on raw thrust instead of lift. We had never seen a jet perform this maneuver. But then when Orlov reached 1,800 feet, we saw the molten glow of the burners wink out.
“Oh, nyet,” another man squawked. “He’s in compressor stall.”
Everybody on the apron stared at the vertical gray dart as it decelerated and peaked out, then slid back horribly on its tail like a dud rocket. Orlov was about to suffer a fatal compressor stall at only 1,800 feet. He had to eject or die.
But then the airplane sprang alive again. Obviously Orlov had not suffered a compressor stall, but merely throttled back his engines. He now lithely pitched the nose forward, below the horizon line, while simultaneously giving the machine full thrust. The result was a graceful descending spiral that ended in a high-G turn back to reverse his flyby course 300 feet above the runway.
Now Orlov rotated the nose to an impossibly high angle of attack, almost thirty degrees above the horizon, and wagged the aircraft slowly back and forth to graphically demonstrate this astonishing high-alpha maneuver regime. We could clearly see vapor vortices spiraling back from the wings in the dense morning air. The extended forward wingroots, not the wings themselves, provided much of the lift in this flight attitude. Any other airplane that I knew of would have to either stall or go to burner and climb in such a position. But Orlov proceeded leisurely down the entire length of the runway, maintaining a steady speed of less than 150 knots.
Again, as he passed our position, he lit the afterburners and blasted into another vertical climb, this one complicated by a series of snapping aileron rolls. When he topped out, he again dove to that heart-stopping low- altitude flare and flashed by us in a half-roll on afterburner. But this rapid acceleration, which took him to transonic speed in less than three seconds, ended with another sudden spiraling climb.
The entire demonstration flight was being executed within the 7,200-foot length of the runway and below an altitude of 2,400 feet. It seemed impossible that any airplane could be pushed through such violent maneuvers so precisely. But then Orlov demonstrated the aircraft’s maximum, high-G turning rate. With the afterburners laying down a tight, smoky circle of exhaust, he threw the MiG-29 into a turn that stayed well within the narrow oval of the runway traffic boundary. His maximum-rate turn must have pulled more than seven Gs, but was completed in only seventeen seconds. The maneuver reminded me of a graphic image on a computer screen. The airplane obviously delivered whatever Orlov wanted from it. There were no skids or slips, no hesitation. Then he snapped through a series of rolling, climbing split turns that shifted heading every two seconds and topped out, inverted, at 2,400 feet. When he rolled back to level flight, his gear was down and he was set up on final.
Orlov put the fighter gently down almost exactly on the skid marks where he had begun his takeoff roll only six minutes before. The moment his nosewheel touched the runway, his tan, clover-shaped drag chute popped.
All of us stood silently, staring at the fighter as it trundled by and slowed to a stop. Then, quietly at first, the men began to clap. In a second we were all applauding wildly and cheering, like the little kids I had sat with at the Torch Cinema, cheering the brave Shturmovik pilots.
I had been flying jet planes for over four years. And I had just completed perhaps the most demanding flight-proficiency curriculum in the Soviet Air Force. But never in all those years of intense training had I ever imagined an aircraft or a pilot that could perform the display we had just witnessed.
For the first time since being named to the MiG-29 program, I did not regret being diverted from combat duty in Afghanistan. I had wanted to be a fighter pilot for many years. But only now did I understand that this was the fighter I had dreamed about flying.
On the morning of August 8, 1985, I sat with Boris Orlov at a trestle table in our open-sided summer classroom, completing my final briefing before my first flight in the MiG-29. The day before, I had finished my taxi and takeoff roll tests. The MiG-29 was an extremely easy airplane to maneuver on the ground, with the engines providing smooth power at thirty percent throttle, and the nosewheel steering fast and precise using only my left index finger on the steering button on the inboard throttle knob. Because the nose gear strut was mounted aft of the cockpit, the plane turned in a narrow, precise arc. On my practice takeoff roll, I slid the throttles full forward to military power and released the beavertail brake lever on the control stick. The two RD-33 turbofans delivered more acceleration with “dry” thrust than the MiG-23’s RD-27 produced on burner. After only three seconds, I was at seventy-five knots and popped the drag chute to stop short of rotation speed.
Orlov verified that I understood the parameters of my first solo flight envelope. I was to rotate the nose at 126 knots and lift off the runway two seconds later at 153 knots. My climb angle would be limited to thirty degrees, and I had to be sure to retract gear as soon as I cleared the ground.
“Be careful on takeoff, Sasha,” Orlov said in his calm, precise manner. “You’ll find the stick quite sensitive at rotation speed.”
He went on to explain that the automatic retraction of the hinged engine intake protective screens caused a slight aerodynamic fluctuation that produced an abrupt nose-down angular “moment.” This had to be parried with a
