Red Eagles: book opinion?

So I bought and read the book “Red Eagles” by Steve Davies. I found it a bit disjointed but I really enjoyed the opinions of the Mig’s by US pilots.

They were universally enamored by the Mig 21’s. Multiple pilots talked about how it was superior to the F4 as a dog fighter. They made it sound like the F4 was a square peg trying to be hammered in to a round hole as a dog fighter. The F4 had many great attributes but the general opinion was that a well flown Mig 21 would shoot down a well flown F4 just about every time. I wish there was of a comparison to the F8 Crusader. Even when flown against against much more modern US fighters, like the F16 and F15…the US pilots had better be careful!

They loved flying the Mig 21. The fighter had no bad habits and was a wonderful handling airplane. They did complain that taxing the airplane was reversed from what they considered normal and when explained, did sound very goofy. They also said that visibility out of the cockpit was pretty poor and the layout was a mess. There were all kinds of valves all over the place that had to be twiddled with. They said it looked like it had been designed by a plumber.

No mention was made of maintenance problems with the airframe itself and the impression was that it was extremely rugged. The main complaint was that engines were built to be disposable, 150 or so hours and off it went to GE to be TBO’d as best they could….to the tune of 6 million dollars each. Which was a gigantic amount of money at that time. They never said it was unreliable but that it just wasn’t designed to last.

The Mig 23’s they had were another story. The US pilots were scared to death of them and just about every part of it was a maintenance nightmare. They did say that while the engine had a horrible habit of self destructing on a regular basis, it was the most powerful engine any of them had ever encountered and the Mig 23 was incredibly fast. However, going Mach 2.5 was likely to get you killed. Apparently the cockpit canopy would just about melt and kill you. Any high G maneuvers would cause the engine to come apart and kill you. Once at high speed, if the plane was abruptly slowed down the turbine blades would brake off, the engine would come apart and kill you…I guess they were afraid of getting killed.

They said the engine was so big that radar routinely identified the Mig 23 as a DC10. I swear, that’s what they wrote.

Did they ever cure the cockpit layout complaints in the later Mig 21 versions? It sounds like a wonderful airplane. Pity they couldn’t marry the GE J79 to the Mig 21. As I understand it, that engine was pretty much bullet proof. I bet if they managed to pull that off, they’d still be flying them at Groom Lake. They really liked that aircraft….