AK-47 OF THE AIR
WHILE THE UNITED STATES WAS CRANKING OUT CENTURY SERIES FIGHTERS, ALL SPECTACULAR BUT NONE PARTICULARLY EFFECTIVE IN THE ROLE FOR WHICH THEY WERE INTENDED, THE SOVIET UNION QUIETLY CAME UP WITH A WEAPON OF ENORMOUS CAPABILITY, PERFORMANCE, ECONOMY AND LONGEVITY: THE SINGLE-ENGINE, MACH 2 MIKOYAN-GUREVICH MIG-21 “FISHBED.”
It was an airplane that hewed to the classic “perfect is the enemy of good enough” approach. The Americans were trying to create superfighters in small numbers, but the Soviets wanted to fill the sky with thousands of simple, lightweight, reliable jets. After all, that strategy had worked splendidly with the AK-47 rifle.
Fishbed was its randomly chosen NATO identifier. The Soviets hated it, just as they hated Fagot, Faithless, Frogfoot and other Western names for their fighters. The MiG-21 had no official Russian identifier, but its popular handle was Balalaika, after the triangular folk instrument—an obvious reference to the MiG’s delta wing.
The MiG-21 had a long production run—1959 to 1985—and the airplane was thereafter updated and modified by companies in India, Israel and Romania; copied by the Chinese; and simply rebuilt and kept in service so long that even today there are 14 developing countries operating the ancient jet as their first-line fighter. The Fishbed is the most-produced supersonic fighter of all time, with 11,496 manufactured. Its baby brother, the transonic MiG-15, holds the all-time jet record: some 18,000 units.
The final Soviet-produced Fishbed was the MiG-21bis, manufactured between 1972 and 1985. This refined model corrected many of the failings of earlier marques. (, Latin for “second,” more broadly means “improved.”) The ultimate MiG modification was the Indian Air Force’s MiG-21-93, which the Indians called the Bison. It had a
