I distinctly remember this event when it happened. I was 17 years old and just finished my junior year of high school in Detroit.
For a minute there I thought this was a recap of the movie “Firefox”
I remember that day, and thought it was a great victory for the free world by that courageous man.
Its radar profile signature would light up like the Strip in Las Vegas. It would be dead meat in air to air or ground to air missiles. It is an engineering masterpiece but dead meat in combat against a technologically sophisticated foe.
Today in combat the rules are quite simple, “if you can see it before it sees you,” you will die.
I was at Laughlin AFB, TX, when he drove that Mig 25 into Japan. I read the book too. I was told it was not designed to be a fighter, but an interceptor, to shoot down the B-70. It was inferior to the F-15 below 50,000 feet, but superior over 50,000 feet. It was, essentially, an aircraft without a mission, since the B-70 was canceled.
Victor had a great sense of humor.
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Just, wow!
You have to admit, the Soviets made some really cool looking military hardware.
Belenko’s MiG 25 was disassembled, crated, and sent to Dayton, Ohio. A good friend and former roommate of mine worked in the Soviet division of the CIA at the time and he was sent to Dayton to inspect the reassembled MiG. He told me later that there was considerable disagreement within the Air Force and the CIA about how to interpret the plane’s construction and technology (hand rivets, vacuum tubes, the apparent lack of an ejection seat mechanism, etc.). We can now appreciate some of the advantages of the seemingly rudimentary design and construction, like we do the early AK-47, but at the time it was considered by many to be evidence of the inferiority of Soviet technology. It is true that their technology was generally far behind ours, but the MiG-25 was not the crucial evidence.