Vietnamese Air Force

An interesting air force in SE Asia that seldom gets mentioned is the Vietnam’s People Air Force.

http://www.scramblemagazine.nl/orbats/vietnam

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_People’s_Air_Force

As an air force it has quite an illustrious history, it’s pilots having duked it out with US forces a few decades ago.

This included several pilots becoming aces.

In fact it could be said that Vietnamese pilots are directly responsible for aircraft such as F-15/-16/-18 and a lot of modern air maneouvre doctrine and tactics – it is their skillful usage of MiG-17/-19/-21 that led to the US rethinking air combat.

Anyhow modern Vietnamese Air Force is currently based on MiG-21bis, Su-27/-30 and Su-22 (acquired as recently as 2006!).

Numbers are hard to come by but it seems they have:

2 regiments: Su-30MK2V
1 regiment: Su-27SK/P/PU – apparently OCU
3 regiments: Su-22M4/UM-3
3 regiments: MiG-21bis/UM

What constitutes a regiment is unknown but it would appear to be 12-24 aircraft.

They’ve also ordered Yak-130 (8-10 airframes).

They used to operate very early model Mi-24 Hind As (glasshouse cockpit) but status is unknown:

Rest of the fleet is usual Eastern gear (An-2, An-26, Mi-8/-17, Yak 52 and L-39C) but at least 1 Vietnam War relic remains in service in form of about 15 UH-1H Hueys.

In past they also operated F-5 Freedom Fighter/Tiger, A-37B Dragonfly and CH-47 Chinook but all of these were retired some time ago.