For sale: Albania’s MiG aircraft fleet

Reuters/MSNBC ^ | 11-1-2005 | Staff

[Dashing Dasher]

Updated: 11:22 a.m. ET Nov. 1, 2005

TIRANA, Albania - Albania’s antiquated air force of Soviet-designed MiG aircraft, which killed 35 Albanian pilots but no enemies, is finally on its way to the museum and the scrapheap, the armed forces chief said on Tuesday.

“If anyone wants to buy them, they are welcome,” Gen. Pellumb Qazimi told Reuters. Some potential Western buyers “wanted to turn them into bars,” he said.

For the Albanian military, the general said, the future lies in a fleet of modern helicopters able to “interact with the planes of the (NATO) alliance we want to join.”

{snip}

The first MiG-15 squadron arrived from the Soviet Union in 1951 and it had seen action in Korea, said Perikli Teta, Albania’s air force engineer-in-chief for 17 years.

“You could still see where the bullet holes had been repaired,” Teta told Reuters. The 15s were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by scores of MiG-17s, or Frescoes in NATO parlance, and MiG-19s, known to the alliance as Farmers.

All have the stubby swept-back wings, cigar shaped fuselage and nose intake of the iconic communist Cold War interceptor.

{snip}

[Dashing Dasher]

If I can't have Dago Red, I'll take a Bear.

[kilowhskey]

Have you seen any Bears for sale? Would the soviets sacrifice that much loss of face for a few yankee bucks?

[hattend]

The Russians will take you into space on Soyuz for $20 million and give you an hour in a Mig 29 for $35 thousand. I'm sure in between those two extremes, you can finagle a Bear out of them. ;-)

[kilowhskey]

That's a good point, Don.