April 6, 2011 at 2:00 pm
I’ve been reading up on the Flogger series as of late (reading Yefim Gordon’s Aerofax book at the moment), and I got to thinking. It’s interesting that in many of the current hotspots in both Africa & the Middle East, the Flogger is reportedly in service in quite a number of the nations involved.
Libya is the first to come to mind, but Syria is also in play, and I’ve even heard of small numbers of Flogger variants flying for both Yemen and the Ivory Coast.
As such, I got to wondering just where Floggers are actually still in operational service. Seems like just as with its European counterpart, the Mirage F-1, it’s a dying breed, but I thought it might be fun to pool our knowledge and see who knows what about the Flogger series as it stands in 2011 thus far.
From what I can tell the following countries use Flogger variants: (Please correct my list as necessary.)
Angola – possible MiG-23-98 upgrades?
Libya – probably not many left now…due to be retired later this year anyway
Ivory Coast – perhaps a pair of the fighter models?
Cuba – any status on them? Perhaps a dozen or so still flying?
Yemen – a few dozen at one point…any flying now?
Syria – fairly sizeable fleet of M/MF/MS/MLD models plus BN’s & trainers
North Korea – fighters and trainer models…perhaps a 50 or 60 max?
Sri Lanka – MiG-27’s and a single MiG-23UB
India – probably the largest current operator with just MiG-27’s (any MiG-23UB’s?)
Vietnam – Gordon’s book mentions some were delivered in the 80’s, but are any still flying?
Ethiopia – MiG-23BN’s & UB’s? Are any still flying after the wars in the late 90’s?
I’ve also heard that both Namibia and Zimbabwe have a few examples, but I can’t imagine either would have the funding to fly them.
Any thoughts?