Fulcrum

by Alexander Mikhaylovich Zuyev

  With the Navy’s Blue Angels,

  Lt. John Foley, USN,

  San Diego Air Show, 1990.

  USS Abraham Lincoln, welcoming ceremony afte carrier landing, with F-14 Aardvarks Squadror VF-114, 1991.

  CHAPTER 6

  MiG-29

  1984–85

  In the first week of December 1984, I joined a group of Air Force officers boarding an An-26 “Curls” transport at a military airfield near Tbilisi. We were en route to several other bases in Georgia to pick up more officers and eventually fly north to the VVS Fourth Flight Tactical Advanced Training and Test Evaluation Center at Lipetsk. My group was the core of a regiment to be equipped with the new MiG-29. The Lipetsk training center had already given the MiG-29 orientation course to two similar groups, one from the prestige fighter base at Kubinka near Moscow, and the other from a Combat Leader Regiment in the Ukraine. There were only a few production-line MiG-29s already in service, and our assignment, once we received the new aircraft, would be to complete the complex, and rigorous, combat evaluation tests.

  Igor Novogilov and I were the only two lieutenants selected from Vaziani. The other three officers from our base were First Class pilots; two were captains, the other a major. Major General Shubin, the VVS deputy military district commander, and two full colonels from his staff made up the Tbilisi contingent. At Tskhakaya we picked up three captains from the Meria regiment and a colonel who was division deputy commander. Late that afternoon we landed at Gudauta on the Black Sea, where four more experienced pilots climbed on board to round out our party. Novogilov and I exchanged glances as these officers settled in for the long flight north. We were the only two Second Class pilots on board. Apparently our performance had rated high enough to merit selection. I certainly appreciated the honor, but I knew a lot of hard work lay ahead.

  Whatever other advantages came from this assignment, the selection of Igor and me to fill senior pilot slots in the new regiment was a pleasant surprise. This guaranteed us promotion to captain at the earliest opportunity. Even as an experienced First Class pilot, a senior lieutenant could not be promoted in military rank unless he filled an appropriate position. So most junior officers in established regiments had to accept flying as wingmen. Only a senior pilot could lead a two-plane formation. In fact, there were some fellows at Vaziani who had been serving as senior lieutenants for years. Now I was going to become a captain well ahead of my peers.

  As the plane droned along, the late afternoon sun lit the high glaciers of the Caucasus off to the east. I could distinguish the twin white cones of Mount Elbrus, the tallest peak in Europe. In the Abkhas language Elbrus meant “untarnished virgins’ breasts.” My regiment’s young pilots joked that Elbrus was the only virgin with tits in the whole Transcaucasus. The mountain’s lower slopes were thick with snowfields glowing pastel peach in the sunset. I was scheduled to take my delayed mandatory annual leave after New Year’s up at the Terskol military ski resort on the slopes of Mount Elbrus, where I’d learned to ski the year before. This was a nice prospect, which had kept me going through the rough training at Vaziani. But now I was more excited about what lay ahead at Lipetsk.

  Listening to the senior officers banter back and forth as they played poker and preferans in the transport cabin, I learned that we would receive an intense one-month orientation on the new aircraft’s systems, but no actual flight training. We would then return to our own bases and only report to the new regiment when at least one squadron of MiG-29s was available. The regiment would be formed at Gudauta, a base which had bounced from the PVO to the VVS under Ogarkov’s reorganization. The last PVO Su-15 regiment at Gudauta was transferred to Anadir in the Arctic in only three days, after an American SR-71 overflew Soviet Far East. A Yak-28 regiment was then transferred to Gudauta. That was fine with me. Gudauta was close to the resort town of Sochi, which had some of the best nightlife on the Black Sea, including beachside discos with authentic Western music. It was a splendid town to visit as a single fighter pilot. Some of the married fellows from Transcaucasus regiments also patrolled the pebbly beaches and swimming pools. And the flying weather was less humid than in central Georgia.

  Lipetsk was a fast-growing industrial center in the Don Basin. Some of the most modern Soviet iron and steel works and related machine-tool and chemical plants were clustered here. In turn, a number of aviation enterprises and support factories for the big military design bureaus were located in Lipetsk. The town had a reputation of being very hospitable to visiting pilots.

  And I discovered just how friendly the people of Lipetsk were, the very first night when Igor and I went for a walk after dinner. We were on the way to the telephone office to call our parents when two good-looking young women in stylish fur jackets approached us on the icy sidewalk. Because there were so few single Russian women in Georgia, I was always attracted to pretty girls when I traveled. Usually I checked out their legs first, but on this occasion I was mesmerized by one of the girls’ luminous blue eyes. To my surprise those innocent blue eyes were fixed just below my waist. She was blatantly inspecting me.

  After the girls passed us, I turned to Igor. “I feel like she just opened my zipper with her eyes,” I said. “I’ve never seen a woman so bold.”

  Luckily I still had a good supply of high-quality condoms from my years in Armavir. Besides being the site of an illustrious VVS pilots’ academy, Armavir had the only condom factory in the entire Russian Republic. We had so many condoms that we even decorated our New Year’s trees with them. And before I left, I had laid in a good stock of their products.

  Condoms were as valuable as gold in the Soviet military. They were the only form of contraception available — besides abortion, of course. And the venereal disease rate in towns like Lipetsk was quite high, so I made sure to bring a good supply of Armavir’s best-quality condom with me. It was a real shame that the Defense Ministry wasn’t prepared to outfit all the troops so well. Apparently our imperialist enemies were more generous. Intelligence officers had told us that the American Army was so rich that they actually gave their “boys” two 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 at a much quicker pace than previous planes.

  “The MiG-29 is a fourth-generation aircraft,” the colonel instructor lectured from the front of the classroom. He tapped the display board to illustrate his point. “The MiG-15 through MiG-17 subsonic jet fighters represent the first generation.” He tapped the diagram of the familiar MiG-21, with its distinctive delta wing, and the American F-4. “These Mach 2 aircraft, equipped with radar-guided missiles, are the second generation.”

  “The variable-geometry MiG-23 and the American F-14 are the third generation.”

  Now the colonel strode to the large engineering model of the MiG-2
9 mounted near his lectern. “Comrades,” he said proudly, “this is the fourth generation.”

  The colonel proceeded to highlight the new fighter’s principal characteristics. As the officers around me in the overheated room listened intently, I realized that my new aircraft did, indeed, represent an entire new generation of technology. And I was astounded that the plane incorporated so many advances in a single aircraft.

  The conceptual sketches in the Western publications had not done justice to the plane’s streamlined aerodynamic contours. The airframes of the MiG-23 and Su-17 — the last of the third-generation Soviet fighters — jutted with sharp, drag-producing angles. But the MiG-29 was a smooth flow of wing, lifting fuselage, and raked tail fins, blended around the long parallel tubes of the RD-33 turbofan engines. Certainly the plane evoked graceful power. But an experienced pilot could also see its inherent maneuverability.

  Then our instructor began to recite the performance data. With a normal combat load, the plane had a sea-level rate of climb of 65,000 feet per minute. And the MiG-29 also had tremendous maneuverability. When we were told the acceleration rates, the rate and radius of turns, many of the officers around me whispered to each other to verify they had heard correctly. Then the instructor noted that, with combat fuel and weapons loads, the MiG-29 had a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.35.

  This was accomplished, he noted with obvious pride, by using ultra-light alloys of aluminum and lithium in the primary airframe and incorporating composite material such as graphite and carbon fibers in control surfaces and honeycomb stiffening in the twin tails. The colonel assured us that the space-age composite materials were stronger than titanium-steel alloys, but as light as cardboard. The fighter, he explained, had been built to perform nine-G maneuvers, the maximum safe aerodynamic stress that a veteran pilot could tolerate without blackout or injury. The air-frame itself could pull over twelve Gs, so we obviously would have to be aware of the fighter’s incredible potential.