When the CIS — Commonwealth of Independent States, or what used to be the Soviet Union — was desperately short of cash in 1990, it sold a twenty-four-plane squadron of Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-29 Fulcrum jet fighters to the German Luftwaffe. The Germans, Americans, and others had seen the highly rated Soviet counterair fighter performing at air shows with its computer-controlled maneuvering flaps and the canton lever structure of its twin-finned tail unit demonstrating its agility.
But until now the West had never had a Fulcrum really to put through its paces, and all of the experts knew that air-show flying was one thing, air combat something else. The Fulcrum had demonstrated its ability, for example, to go into a tail-slide climb, a characteristic underscored in the hammerhead stall/tail-slide maneuver the aircraft was able to accomplish at a relatively low altitude of 2,500-3,000 feet, losing itself on radar in the near-vertical hover position.
But how dazzling would it be when put through the tight, gut-wrenching maneuvers dictated by a dogfight against, say, an F-14 Tomcat? The first up-close inspection of the Fulcrum by western experts didn’t look that promising. The German engineers sent from Messerschmitt kicked the tires and felt the plane’s skin and were frankly disdainful. One of them from Frankfurt contemptuously called the skin “Rice Krispies,” the plane’s bumpy surface, compared with the smooth surfaces produced for the American fighters, being the result of inferior rolling of the metal.
Then the Luftwaffe pilots took the Fulcrum up and were ecstatic. Some claimed the MiG-29 was the best fighter ever built. At Mach2.3, or 1,520 miles per hour, the plane, which could pull eleven G’s as opposed to an American nine, was a relatively small fighter. It was only 37 feet 4½ inches from wingtip to wingtip, and 57 feet long, as opposed to the American Tomcat’s 64 feet 1½ inch width and length of 62 feet. The plane’s box intake engines pushed the Fulcrum faster not only than the Tomcat but also the F-16 Falcon and F-18 Hornet, and it had a faster rate of climb than the Hornet. Only the F-15 Eagle could match its speed, but even then the Fulcrum was so good in its double S turns, loops, its flip-up midflight attack, and its spectacular dives on afterburner — its pilot equipped with an amazingly simple and cheap infrared “look-shoot” system — that the Luftwaffe quickly incorporated the Fulcrum squadron into its air force. And then the habitually skeptical engineers made the most intriguing discovery of all — namely that the inferior bumpy skin afforded the aircraft substantially more lift than the smoother, better-milled skin of its Allied counterparts.
Its two serious weaknesses were a comparatively small fuel capacity, giving it a maximum in-air time of only two hours without external tanks, which would have made it heavier, and, like all CIS-made fighters, it had been built to be directed by ground control and could take only one target on at a time. If ground control went out then the Fulcrum was effectively out, as opposed to the Allied pilots who fought largely independently of ground control. This factor notwithstanding, the speed and sheer agility of the Fulcrum made it a superb aircraft, and China, through the timely purchases of General Cheng, congratulated itself on gaining fifty of the aircraft from the CIS, all fifty planes stationed on airfields throughout the populous eastern half of the country.
One of the Siberian instructors who had come to China with the fifty aircraft was Sergei Marchenko, the renowned air ace who had downed over seventeen U.S. fighters, among them Frank Shirer’s F-14 Tomcat. Shirer had returned the compliment over Korea, but like him, Marchenko had managed to bail out to live and fight another day.
Shirer doubted he would ever get the chance to go up against Marchenko again. Even the talk of him possibly being given a try on the Harrier in Britain was no real consolation. Oh, the Harrier was a fighter, all right, but with a maximum speed of only 607 miles per hour, 5 Mach — not much faster than some commercial airliners — it was hardly a promotion to top-of-the-line. If flying B-52s was like driving a bus after the thrill of a BMW, then a Harrier was like getting a station wagon to drive after having handled a formula one racer. It would be a step up of sorts from the bombers, perhaps, but the Harrier was so damn slow compared to the Tomcat. And besides, he knew he was being asked only because of the shortage of Harrier pilots, most of them having graduated upward to the Falcons and Hornets.
Sergei Marchenko’s reputation in Siberia as the Ubiytsa yanki— “Yankee Killer”—ace came with him, though in Beijing he was called the cat man, the man of many lives. Whatever he was called he was held in awe, for despite the fact that he was a long-nose — a Caucasian — the Chinese pilots knew they had a lot to learn from his experience. And even if he was aloof and sometimes distant toward his PLA hosts, his ability to take the Fulcrum into a hammerhead stall/slide — to go into a near vertical climb, reduce the thrust of the twin 18,300-pound augmented bypass turbojets, and then let the plane slide earthward, all under 2,600 feet — was legendary. And when the Chinese saw how this maneuver could play havoc with enemy radar — which because of the lack of relative speed momentarily lost the Fulcrum from its screen — Marchenko’s skill was greeted with gasps of admiration.
Politically speaking, Marchenko, a Russian, son of the one-time STAVKA, or High Command, member Kiril Marchenko in Moscow, had no particularly strong beliefs one way or the other about the Chinese, the Siberians — or the Americans for that matter. But he was a Russian, proud of it, and, like Shirer, all he cared about was flying. If this involved killing Americans, so be it. All he wanted to do was to maintain his reputation as the top ace, and he was somewhat chagrined by the fact that unless the Americans crossed the Manchurian border in significant numbers of aircraft, it didn’t seem as if he’d be doing any more than training Chinese pilots as part of the fifty-plane deal.