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He reassured us that the Armavir curriculum would not be accelerated because of Afghanistan.

As I sat in the darkened auditorium, I marveled at the organization and precision of the operation. I was a member of a powerful professional military organization that acted with courageous resolve when necessary.

When we returned to Pirsagat for advanced L-29 training in March, the focus was on navigation, formation flying, and acrobatic and combat maneuvers, which prepared us to fly the higher performance MiG-21FM. This was a transition aircraft that would sharpen our skills for assignments to combat regiments equipped with the supersonic MiG-23.

Cross-country navigation over the Azerbaijan desert was a real challenge. Some guys got lost and made it back to base with only the proverbial “bucket of fuel” remaining in their tanks. In such cases, Soviet aviators could switch to radio channel 4 and request a radio-direction-finding (RDF) fix to guide them back to base. Our controllers at Pirsagat were often Central Asians who spoke with strong accents in Russian. But there was one fluent, unaccented Russian voice that sometimes answered on that frequency. It belonged to an Iranian who would try to guide an unwary young Soviet cadet over the border into Iran. We were told that he worked for the American CIA. That was one more pitfall to avoid.

Our training climaxed that summer with a formal maneuver competition among the cadets. We flew a set of increasingly difficult maneuvers over a three-day period, each sortie flown with a different judge in the backseat.

The first maneuvers were relatively simple, involving horizontal figure eights that had to be entered and exited at exact, predetermined headings and speeds. But as the competition progressed, we had to fly double spins and split-S’s, again entering the maneuver at a precise compass heading and exiting at a prearranged altitude and speed. I had practiced this stage of the competition repeatedly. I knew exactly when to chop the throttle, how hard to pull back on the stick, and how much rudder pressure was needed. I scored well on the first two days.

But on the third day of the competition, we had to integrate the vertical, horizontal, and speed elements. I began the last series of maneuvers at an altitude of 9,000 feet and a speed of 270 knots. As before, I had mentally rehearsed the exact sequence many times. By the time I was in my second rolling climb to 9,000 feet, I realized I was almost finished with the hardest segment of the competition and that I had made very few mistakes.

That afternoon the instructors met to compile the cadets’ cumulative scores. The unattainable perfect competition score totaled 400 points. When they posted the results that evening, I had scored highest with a tally of 380.

From my point of view, the positive result of our transfer to the VVS was the sudden announcement that the Air Force had chosen Armavir as the first pilots’ academy for an experimental accelerated flight-training program. A select group of cadets from my class were to phase directly from the L-29 trainer to the MiG-23 advanced jet fighter. In the past, both PVO and VVS cadet pilots had to spend several years mastering the complexities of the high-performance MiG-21 before qualifying to fly a “third generation” aircraft like the MiG-23.

The fifty best-qualified cadets of the 250 who remained in my class were selected for MiG-23 training. Based on my performance at Pirsagat, I was in this group. So were my friends Sergei Mashenko, “Deep Freeze” Morozov, Dmitri from Leningrad, and “Boris” Bagomedov from Dagestan, one of the few successful Asian cadets.

The MiG-23 cadets were assembled on a ramp near the Burav runway where a variety of fighter aircraft were kept for familiarization purposes. The big gray MiG-23 parked there was almost twice as long and four times as heavy as the L-29 trainer. The MiG-23 evoked brute power and speed. Its tapered nose ended in the bullet tip of a gray radar dome, from which a titanium Pitot instrument probe extended like a lance. Just aft of the canopy, the two tall, rectangular engine air intakes gaped open, which explained why pilots of the smaller MiG-21 called the MiG-23 the Crocodile. This image was intensified by the widespread main landing gear, protected by the angled plate of mud deflectors, which gave the undercarriage the appearance of a crouching reptile’s clenched legs. In turn, MiG-23 pilots scornfully called the MiG-21 okurok, “cigarette butt.”

The massive Tumansky R-29 turbofan engine occupied most of the fuselage, terminating in the heavy segmented alloy ring of the afterburner. Thick, swiveling powered differential stabilizers and a hulking vertical tail over twelve feet high made it clear that this aircraft was designed for high supersonic speeds.

The MiG-23 was a variable-geometry fighter, and its wings were the most striking feature of the aircraft. Set high on the fuselage, they had a tapered cross section, thick near the center and saber-thin at the tips. In flight the plane’s wings could be swung back from the low speed configuration of sixteen degrees from perpendicular to the fuselage, all the way to a sharply swept falcon-tuck of seventy-two degrees for the top supersonic speed of Mach 2.35.

Like all high-performance fighters of its generation, the MiG-23 was a design compromise. To perform well at the high-G, supersonic end of the flight envelope, the airplane traded lift for raw power. With the wings tucked completely back, the stabilizers provided responsive pitch and roll control. However, even with the wings returned forward to the minimum sixteen-degree-sweep angle, the MiG-23 could become dangerously unstable at subsonic speed.

To demonstrate the power of the big afterburning Tumansky R-29 turbofan, an instructor climbed into the aircraft, started the engine, and ran it up to full military power. A deep, rasping roar hit us, and the ground seemed to tremble. There was a heavy concrete block resting on the slope of the steel blast deflector behind the aircraft’s tail pipe. The block must have weighed three tons. When the pilot hit the afterburner, a pulsing tube of orange flame erupted from the tail pipe with a thunderous crack. On afterburner the engine developed over twelve tons of thrust. The concrete block was blown away, spiraling like a maple leaf in the wind, and landed twenty yards behind the blast deflector.

“That’s your engine,” a captain instructor shouted, once the roar had abated. “You will have to learn to control this machine, or it will control you… right into the ground.”

Our MiG-23 ground classes were piled on top of our regular aeronautical engineering studies. There was a cadet saying, “blue nose, Red Diploma,” which referred to the almost superhuman effort required to earn the coveted Red Diploma for academic excellence. All of us felt our noses turning blue that year. But we were old soldiers now and we knew how much slack to expect from the instructors, and what regulations we could bend or break. And the strict rule against unauthorized visits to town was the one regulation we most enjoyed breaking.

It was unrealistic for the academy commander, General Major of Aviation Nikolai Kryukov, to expect healthy young men like ourselves to remain stone-sober and celibate when there were nursing students, vodka, and beer virtually a stone’s throw from the glass-studded front wall of the academy. Again the sense of losing the best years of our youth often overwhelmed us. And our restrictive life seemed so unnecessary when Dmitri informed us that cadets at American military academies actually had telephones in their rooms and were allowed to drive cars to visit girls in towns like Annapolis and West Point. By our second summer at Armavir, the members of my unofficial “crew” were all veterans of the Ho Chi Minh Trail over that wall.