But under Gorbachev’s lead, the government seemed to have lost all sense of proportion on this issue. The Politburo ordered the Ministry of Planning, Gosplan, to slash the production of all alcoholic drinks, and the Ministry of Finance to triple beer and vodka prices. Gorbachev had decreed that moderate wine consumption was still acceptable, so naturally wine prices immediately shot up. To make matters worse, the Gosplan order to abruptly limit alcohol production was interpreted by zealous apparatchiks in the South as a mandate to destroy valuable vineyards. Night after night the Vremya newscast from Moscow showed Crimean and Ukrainian vineyards, and even some plum orchards, blazing, while the obviously glum kolkhozniki were forced to smile grimly beneath unfurled anti-alcohol banners.
But as Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign rumbled ahead mindlessly, driven by the clumsy bureaucracy, I began to realize he was not the perceptive, astute, and decisive young leader I had imagined. With vineyards destroyed, wine was in short supply, so moderate consumption was not an option. Either people stopped drinking completely, or bought home brew, samogon.
And after a short visit home, where I saw crowds of sober, angry people in the streets of Samara after a football match, I realized that Gorbachev had no valid insight to the mood of the people, as he had claimed.
Here in Georgia, where many of the vineyards and fruit orchards were in private hands, the bootleggers were having a field day. In Russia scarce vodka at the State liquor stores had become very expensive, a bottle of Siberskaya jumping to ten rubles. But in Georgia there was plenty of liquor, wine, and champagne in State stores. And there was always some friendly Vasily or Antanasy willing to sell you black market cognac. A sudden black market in bootleg alcohol began to spread from the South throughout the Soviet Union. Drinking was just too deeply ingrained in Soviet life to be abolished by decree. Gorbachev should have understood this. But he obviously did not.
One dramatic result of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign was the rapid spread of criminal trafficking in aircraft alcohol among the maintenance personnel of the PVO and VVS. All our jet fighters used grain alcohol in their air-conditioning and electronics cooling systems. The more modern the aircraft, the more refined the grade of cooling alcohol that was used. In fact, some of the most highly distilled alcohol — far “smoother” than the cheap grain vodka sold by the State — was used in PVO Sukhoi interceptors. And in Lipetsk, I’d learned that the new MiG-29 used an even purer cooling spirit officially called “SVS,” which some wag immediately dubbed spirta vodochnaya smes, “pure alcohol mixed with vodka.”
During my training at Lipetsk, several officers had commented about the large quantity of super-pure alcohol in the plane’s cooling systems. An instructor had noted the comments of the MiG OKB designer Comrade Belosvet on the subject: “This is the MiG-29. If necessary, we’ll use five-star Armenian brandy.”
There had always been a problem in the PVO and VVS with maintenance officers and soldier mechanics siphoning off a little alcohol, for their own use or sale on the black market. And pilots in remote regiments in the Arctic or the Far East occasionally played a devastating drinking game called Polar Bear, in which they drank aircraft alcohol. The pilots playing sat around a table with a shot glass of alcohol in front of them. They bet money on each shot, which went into the bank. At regular intervals, someone shouted, “Polar bear.” They all downed their shots and jumped under the table to hide from the imaginary bear. This could go on for hours. The winner was the last man who could still climb out from the pile of drunken pilots passed out beneath the table.
But these excesses had been rare, and usually limited to dead-end PVO regiments.
Now not just burnt-out maintenance officers but some squadron and regimental staff began stealing and selling aircraft alcohol. The shpaga “fencing foil” alcohol from MiG-21s and Su-15s was so rough that it had to be mixed with fruit juice to be palatable. But some PVO units flying the big MiG-25 interceptors — known to pilots as the “flying cocktail lounge" — had access to almost unlimited quantities of much better refined alcohol, which could be diluted slightly with distilled water and sold in vodka bottles with counterfeit labels at an incredible profit. MiG-25 pilots also used this alcohol as valuta, hard currency, to buy construction materials to build small dachas, garages, or as bribes to place their kids in a decent kindergarten. That summer the aviation regiments in the Transcaucasus began using much greater quantities of cooling alcohol than ever before, even though the weather was not noticeably warmer. We all knew what was going on, yet the zampolits and commanders ignored the matter because no one wanted to stand up to expose the glaring policy failures of the new leader.
Another unanticipated result of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign was a spreading disrespect for State authority, the Militia, and the KGB. Because no Party official was willing to admit the campaign had boomeranged and had spawned a huge new bootleg-alcohol black market, the black marketeers began to flourish, unmolested by authorities. They quickly branched out into other fields, including luxury goods such as video players, pornographic cassettes, and hard currency. So while the Politburo was proudly announcing the rapidly spreading popularity of temperance groups in government offices and State factories, an entire new criminal class was getting rich.
And apparently Gorbachev was unaware of the problem. Obviously he was unaware of the growing food shortages undercutting morale in many regions. Still maintaining his popular image, he often visited factories and 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 swu
ng 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 single light backward tug on the stick. Too much and the computer-controlled hydraulic stall limiter would knock the stick forward; too little and the pitch-down might delay airspeed dangerously so close to the runway.
I carefully printed his instructions in the exact sequence he gave them on a clean page of my personal flight log.
“This is not a major problem,” Orlov assured me. “In fact, many of the test pilots ran multiple takeoffs before they ever detected the pitch-down.” He smiled. “But I know you young fighter jockeys like to look good on your first takeoff with a new aircraft.”
I grinned back at the famous test pilot. Suddenly it occurred to me that he had perhaps the best job in the world. He traveled widely in the Soviet Union, demonstrating new aircraft and tactics at combat regiments like mine. And Orlov and his fellow Mikoyan test pilots also spent part of each year at air shows in the West. Since leaving Armavir I had been able to indulge some of my insatiable hunger for travel, but I knew visiting the West was not an option open to me.
Almost three years before, when I had first come to Tskhakaya from the academy, Lieutenant Colonel Trubinin, the deputy regiment commander, had flown with me on several check rides. Apparently he had been impressed by my control of the aircraft and by my habit of careful note-taking.
“Lieutenant Zuyev,” he had told me, after we had debriefed on the last check ride, “you should seriously consider applying for test pilot school. That’s a good career move for a pilot.”
At the time, I was much more concerned about becoming a pilot Second Class than a test pilot and had only made preliminary inquiries. But now, sitting here with Boris Orlov, about to solo in a MiG-29 without benefit of simulat
or or dual-cockpit instruction, the option of one day becoming a test pilot was definitely on my mind. These model 9-12 MiG-29s were the first production aircraft, the “A” model that would equip fourteen regiments. Already, I knew, the Mikoyan OKB and the VVS had plans for a steady, evolutionary modification program on the MiG-29s, one that would lead to a fly-by-wire flight-control system and a cathode-ray-tube “glass cockpit” instrument array, as soon as computers immune to the electromagnetic pulse of nuclear blasts were developed. And an entire new generation of air-combat missiles beyond the Alamo and R-73 was already in development.
In other words, the Air Force would definitely need a new generation of young test pilots for this ambitious MiG-29 modification program. There was no reason why I couldn’t be one of them.
And showing Boris Orlov my professional skill was a good place to start.
I recited the response sequence to the aerodynamic aberration he had mentioned. “I am prepared for my flight, Boris Antonovich,” I said, standing up.
He rose slowly and smiled again. “Have fun,” he said.
I silently reviewed my takeoff checklist, making sure the caution and warning panel showed no red lights, that the canopy was closed and locked, and that my twin-engine RPM needles were stable and matched at seventy percent, “GI,” ground idle. My right hand touched the three lock points on my ejection seat harness and I breathed deeply twice to verify the flow gauge of my oxygen mask. I knew that all the pilots in my squadron were out there on the apron watching. There was no sense waiting. I slid the throttles full open to military power and counted to ten waiting for the engines to stabilize thrust RPM.
Then the fingers of my right hand tripped the brake lever on the stick and the wide runway began to slide past my canopy. I sagged into the seat with the even acceleration. The thrust was so even that the aircraft stayed glued in the center of the takeoff lane without any control input whatsoever.
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