Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17

Um, I mentioned the A26, absolutely brilliant to see.

Um, some top-notch, um, fast jet warbirds as well, so, um, F86 and MiG-17.

That's my only-

Oh, the MiG-17

... slight...

MiG-17, wonderful thing.

Absolutely wonderful thing.

They sent-

The Naval Fighter Weapons School, which most people know as Top Gun, needed aircraft that could realistically simulate Soviet fighters in dissimilar air combat training.

The MiG-17 and MiG-21 were small, agile machines that flew differently from anything American naval aviators typically faced in training.

The F-5 had similar energy characteristics.

It was compact, maneuverable, and could be flown in ways that approximated how a well-trained adversary pilot might approach an engagement.

They have to be fueled.

You know, they're getting close air support from MiG-17s that, you know, with pilots that have to be trained extensively.

And when they die, it's hard to replace them.

You know, your capital city is periodically getting like bombed into the fucking Stone Age.

And, um...

Yeah, so that was supposed to be two days, with the Saturday having an evening display, so something else very attractive to us photographers, and including the MiG-17, which, you know, we've seen at Shuttleworth, and another chance to see that at sunset would have been fantastic.

But, yeah, about a couple of weeks before the show was due to take place, there was an announcement put out that the MiG had in fact cancelled.

But FUBAR themselves are very quick to jump on board and say it wasn't them that cancelled, it was in fact Hampshire that had cancelled the MiG, which set a few alarm bells ringing to why would they do that when it's over every poster and every advert on Facebook and online.

It's one of those things, isn't it, with air shows.

It's just a shame because it did have such a good line-up.

As you say, the MiG-17, the Chinook roll demo, the drone show and the fireworks and everything like that did look quite good, but there you go.

It is one of those things.

She was a 20-year-old nursing student at the time, the only child of wealthy, party-connected parents.

Belenko was assigned, against his wishes, as a MiG-17 instructor at Solsk.

He was shocked by the institutional corruption he witnessed daily.

Flight records were forged, fuel consumption records were falsified, and a drunken flight engineer couldn't be disciplined because it would make his superiors look bad.

I've given, I think, four now, three or four, being the F-35A, Italian Typhoon, Fursan, El Emirat, and probably something else.

I assume probably the MiG-17.

Again, I will have my own rating on the Typhoon next week, so obviously stay tuned for that.

But, I mean, yeah, I saw some Vapor pictures.

Lieutenant Colonel Thorsness circled the descending parachutes to keep the crew members in sight and relay their positions to the sear- search and rescue center.

During this maneuver, a MiG-17 was sighted in the area.

Lieutenant Colonel Thorsness immediately initiated an attack and destroyed the MiG.

I'll get into that in a minute, too.

Because his aircraft was low on fuel, he was forced to depart the area in search of a tanker.

Upon being advised that two helicopters were orbiting over the downed crew's position and that there were hostile MiGs in the area posing a serious threat to the helicopters, Lieutenant Colonel Thorsness, despite his low fuel condition, decided to return alone through a hostile environment of surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft defenses to the downed crew's position.

As he approached the area, he spotted four MiG-17 aircraft and immediately initiated an attack on the MiGs, damaging one and driving the others away from the rescue scene.

When it became apparent that an aircraft in the area was critically low on fuel and the crew would have to abandon the aircraft unless they could reach the tanker, Lieutenant Colonel Thorsness, although critically short on fuel himself, helped to avert further possible loss of life and a friendly aircraft by recovering at a foreign operating base, thus allowing the aircraft in emergency fuel condition to refuel, to refuel safely.

The Navy also used F-5s, but they also used A-4s.

A-4 is a pretty good MiG-17 simulator.

A little bit smaller, not quite so fast, turns really well.

That's a MiG-17.

Nobody had a MiG-23 simulator, and the MiG-23 came out about the end of Southeast Asia, and, and the intel communities put that thing out there like that was gonna be the airplane that just beat everybody up and just killed us all.

It would go faster than anything we had.

It required some very creative people at the squadron levels and so forth.

But they made it happen, and along came this program called Constant Peg.