The Fulcrum That Turned the Air War Around | MiG-29
This is the story of how Soviet designers created a fighter that forced the Pentagon to acknowledge the superiority of Russian aviation. It all began with the defeat of the American F-4 Phantom II over Vietnam, where the lightweight MiG-21 proved that close combat had been prematurely written off. In response to the new American F-15 and F-16, scientists at TsAGI and the Mikoyan design bureau came up with a revolutionary aerodynamic solution that the entire Western world had missed. The MiG-29 received a weapon twenty years ahead of its time, survived betrayals and wars, and its aerodynamic foundation proved so successful that it continues to fly and fight in the twenty-first century.
Lessons from Vietnam in 1966, where the MiG-21 crushed the F-4 Phantom II, and secret interceptions of data on the F-15 and F-16 programs
Revolutionary aerodynamics at TsAGI, secret tests in Zhukovsky, and camouflaging the prototype from American spy satellites
A helmet-mounted targeting system, an optical-location station, and the R-73 missile, which had no equivalent in the West
Triumph at the 1988 Farnborough Air Show and the results of mock combat with the F-15 and F-16 after the fall of the Berlin Wall
Baptism of fire in Iraq, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, where it wasn't the aircraft that failed, but the scaled-down export weapons, and a rebirth as the MiG-35
Music: Duty Calls — Rod Kim. Photos and videos are taken from archive.org and are in the public domain.
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