Posted on 07/17/2004 5:17:06 AM PDT by Arrowhead1952
Dreaded instruments of Cold War now in U.S. dogfights
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, July 17, 2004
When Scott Stephens climbs 6,000 feet per minute over Central Texas in his L-39C Soviet bloc fighter-trainer, the Hill Country receding quickly below, or spins a combat-ready barrel roll, there is only one CD he'll blast on his cockpit stereo: the soundtrack to "Top Gun."
Stephens, a Wimberley resident who made his millions in oil field engineering and exploration, bought the Cold War leftover from a retired Ukrainian air force general for $100,000 in 2001. The plane, disassembled, was shipped in a crate through San Francisco and Reno, Nev., before arriving in Texas. An ex-CIA agent brokered the deal, he said.
Now the plane, which sports the Soviet Red Star emblem on the wings, is parked at a hangar at the San Marcos Municipal Airport and, like a host of other Soviet bloc fighter jets sprinkled through Texas, offers a combination of a speedy, maneuverable ride and an expensive celebration of a peculiar nostalgia for the decades-long arms race.
As far as most History Channel junkies are concerned, the Cold War ended with the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But for a distinctly Texan mix of ex-Air Force fighter jockeys and dotcom moguls, these warbirds are still warbling. A few dozen MiGs and L-39s, jet fighters purchased from former Soviet satellite nations through arms dealers in the mid-1990s, now populate the skies over the state, where their owners spin through aerobatic maneuvers, fly in formation and even conduct mock dogfights.
"They're war trophies," said Oscar Vickery, a former Air Force instructor who lives in Galveston and keeps his own MiG at Houston's Ellington Field. (His wife owns a second one.) "We have their planes, and they don't have ours."
But Stephens, who caught the piloting bug from his father, said he purchased the L-39s, which reach speeds of 450 mph, for the pure flying thrill.
"It goes up like a rocket," he said. "You can dive down, pull G's, do loops."
He has invested $400,000 in the assembly and maintenance of his plane; last year it won Best in Show at a contest sponsored by the Experimental Aircraft Association in Wisconsin.
The old Soviet jets are not too hard to come by. Expensive to maintain and lacking an enemy target, the planes became worthless after the Soviet Union crumbled. A host of Soviet allies eagerly disassembled and sold the planes to Western importers and individuals. Vickery said he purchased his MiG-21s (known by the NATO codename "Fishbed") for less than $250,000 each from the Czech Republic in 1998. "Either I would buy it or they would (destroy) it," said Vickery, who also trains pilots to fly MiGs at his school, called Flying Amigos.
There are about 200 L-39s in the country, said Joe Brand, head of International Jets, an Alabama-based company that has imported the aircraft since 1994.
"It's mainly like rich guys in real estate," Brand said of L-39 owners. "You've got civilians who dream of becoming fighter jocks. It's rich guys who've already got several airplanes and want a toy."
Austinite Walt Thiriot, who twice reaped hefty profits on technology startups, bought two L-39s from the Kazakhstan air force for about $300,000 apiece in the mid-1990s. Now they're parked at a hangar at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
"You can't pull those G's in my business jet," he said.
The L-39, Brand said, is a "lot more forgiving" than MiGs, which fly higher and faster and require more expertise.
A "MiG would kick an L-39's butt," Stephens said.
Indeed, the MiG jet fighter, the Soviet aircraft that emerged during the Korean War and served as the foil for several generations of American jets, has a special lure for many of these pilots. Named for Artem Mikoyan, an aviation designer, and Mikhail Gurevich, an aeronautical engineer, who first paired in 1939 to build fighter planes, MiGs long served starring, villainous roles in Cold War movies. They were sketched out as the "bogeys" in "Top Gun" or replayed incessantly as the shadowy nemesis on cable television. Yet little was known about these jets, called "blackhats," through the 1970s, say several ex-military members who own or fly MiGs.
"It's like the most fantastic roller coaster you ever took a ride on," is how Vickery describes flying one. "Take away the rails, and it'll roll as tight as you want."
The Federal Aviation Administration has certified 13 MiGs in Texas (and none in Austin), Roland Herwig, a spokesman for the FAA, said.
"You could purchase it just like a piece of furniture," Herwig said. "The aircraft has to meet our airworthiness standards. In some instances, that might mean deactivating the former armaments on it. Usually, though, they arrive here in pieces."
The process of purchase and import is tricky business, jet owners insist.
"It's a minefield," said Dave Sutton, a New Jersey MiG-15 owner who has imported 20 airplanes. "You're working with semi-reputable suppliers overseas, through shady middlemen."
And then there's the red tape. Even Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle Corp., was thwarted by federal authorities in his bid to import a MiG-29.
"It is disarmed," Ellison explained to a reporter from Upside magazine in 1997, "but theoretically, in a moment of lunacy, you could rearm the airplane and take out a couple of cities."
American buyers must obtain special permission from the State Department to own the old military hardware, endure a quarantine and a lengthy inspection by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives upon importation and, finally, wangle a special certification from the FAA.
But, Sutton said, "How many countries do you think would tolerate the operation of a supersonic interceptor by a private individual?"
Pilots seem to fall, roughly speaking, into two categories: former military pilots, nostalgic for the stick and rudder and willing to scrape together $50,000 for a subsonic Korean War-era MiG 15, or civilian hobbyists wealthy enough to lay out $3.5 million for a 1980s vintage MiG-29, which can fly at roughly twice the speed of sound. Add to that operating and maintenance costs for a MiG-15 of about $1,000 an hour (L-39s cost from $450 to $750 an hour), and a joy ride becomes decidedly pricey.
"There's a MiG for every budget," Lyn Freeman, editor of Plane and Pilot, said. But a cheap pickup might not be a sensible buy; the older MiGs were warbirds, not warhorses.
"They were made for the Soviets, sent out to Soviet countries and made to be repaired in the field by orangutans," Freeman said. "The engines are virtually disposable. You've got a plane designed to drink jet fuel for 10 cents a gallon when it (now) costs $3 a gallon."
Though some of the later MiGs can fly as fast as twice speed of sound, they have to obey airspeed restrictions. But that's as long as they're over land. A number of pilots steer their planes over the Gulf of Mexico and open the throttle.
Some former military pilots, such as Tobe Gooden of Houston, have used their old military skills to turn a buck or two on the dangerous air show circuit.
"Back in my early career, in the early 1970s, I flew against MiGs as part of a secret project," Gooden, a retired air force and commercial aviation pilot, said. "Then all of a sudden I was flying across the United States in one I owned, flying into dinky places like Ardmore, Okla."
Before his MiG-15 was destroyed in a crash (from which he walked away uninjured), Gooden flew 10 to 12 air shows a year during the late 1990s. Invariably, an American F-86 would "shoot down" his MiG as part of an extensive dogfight.
"One of these days I'm just going to win for the fun of it," he would tell himself, as his smoke system once again released a black cloud to signal defeat.
L-39 were produced in Czechoslovakia.
They still produce L-159, It's new version of L-39 with western engines and equipment.
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SO9
PING
I live in San Marcos, TX and I saw this flying about the other day and thought instantly of the movie Top Gun,
by the way, the rag this article came from is know as the austin anti-american statesman
describing a love of history and its artifacts as a peculiar nostalgia for the Cold War arms race...you gotta love the press, they do it even at the lowest levels of journalism.
In the early 1990s, C-Span carried the "Moscow evening news" with English translation. After the unification of Germany, they had a story on integration of Russian Migs into the German air force. The news commentator actually said something to the effect that "of course, these planes were made in Russia and are basically junk compared to the West German aircraft".
As I call it, the Austin Ultra-Liberal Un-American Anti-Bush/Republican Pravda.
Hey, if it wasn't for Ardmore, the Texas Democrats wouldn't have anyplace else to hide.
That American flag symbolises one thing . . .
We got 'em!
Captured!
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