Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15

The skills he exhibited in World War II would once again be tested, this time in a new arena of air warfare, the jet-age dogfight.

We interviewed Bud Mahurin at the Chino, California Planes of Fame Museum between an F-86 and a MiG-15.

What was the general state of our Air Force at that time?

I think we were down to some 32, 33 wings.

But it became the mainstay of U.S. Air Force fighter squadrons in the late 1940s.

It was a straight-wing design which lacked the advantage of German aeronautical research that fell into the hands of the Allies and the Russians at the end of World War II.

That German research gave rise to the two primary jet adversaries of the Korean War, the MiG-15 and the F-86 Sabre.

Bud, tell me about the first time that you flew the Sabre and what you thought of it the first time you ever got in one.

Yeah.

Is where a bunch of Russian, well, Russian, let's be real, MiG-15s hit a flight of B-29s over NAMC in Korea.

And it's like, it's called black, you know, black day over NAMC because they just kick our ass.

They just kick our ass.

It's got six flyable planes.

You've got a Mustang and a Focke-Wulf 190 from World War II, F-86 Sabre and MiG-15 from Korea, and then a F-4 Phantom and MiG-21 MF from Vietnam.

But it's not just those planes, though, when you're playing against AI.

There's like Yak-9s, there's F-105s, there's a group of polygons flying in formation that's supposed to be B-29, B-52s.

He went home, and then he went back to flying.

After the war, Hoover became a test pilot at North American Aviation, the company that built the P-51 Mustang and was now building the F-86 Sabre, the jet fighter that would go up against the Soviet MiG-15 over Korea.

He flew it.

He flew it extremely well with that same combination of instinct and precision that he demonstrated in everything he'd ever touched.