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Keyword: belenko

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  • Viktor Belenko, Who Defected to the West in a MiG-25 Foxbat Jet Fighter, has passed away

    06/30/2025 10:54:45 AM PDT · by where's_the_Outrage? · 37 replies
    The Aviation Geek Club ^ | Nov 22, 2023 | Dario Leone
    Viktor Belenko, the former Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot who defected to the West in 1976 in a MiG-25 high-speed interceptor, has passed away on Sep. 24, 2023 Alert 5 first noted. He died in a nursing home in a small town in Southern Illinois on Sep. 24. However, journalists learned about his death only now. The New York Times quoted Belenko’s son, Paul Schmidt, on Nov. 20 as saying that his father had died after a brief, unspecified illness in a nursing home in Rosebud, Illinois. Viktor Belenko was born into a simple family of Soviet workers on Feb....
  • The pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jet (40 yrs since Mig-25 defection)

    09/05/2016 11:21:26 PM PDT · by sukhoi-30mki · 54 replies
    BBC future ^ | 5 September 2016 | Stephen Dowling
    On 6 September 1976, an aircraft appears out of the clouds near the Japanese city of Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It’s a twin-engined jet, but not the kind of short-haul airliner Hakodate is used to seeing. This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before. The jet lands on Hakodate’s concrete-and-asphalt runway. The runway, it turns out, is not long enough. The jet ploughs through hundreds of feet of earth before it finally comes to rest at the far end of the airport. The pilot...