Your sources only mention Hind crews and SAM commanders… plus instructors for Su-27 and MiG-23 training locals.. not Russians flying combat missions with Su-27s..

Give it up.. :sleeping:

Dude, read the bold print, especially the first two lots of it.

The report follows the confirmation that an Ethiopian Su-27 Flanker destroyed an Eritrea MiG-29 Fulcrum …” [Both planes were apparently flown by Russian pilots]

Neither side, however, has any pilots qualified for the new planes. They are being flown by pilots from Russia, Ukraine or Latvia and both are using Russian technicians for their maintenance.

In fact, the sources contradict you and your stance about Russians or Ukrainians having been involved in the Su-27 vs MiG-29 fighting.

Except for the sources I posted you mean.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/280273.stm

Neither side, however, has any pilots qualified for the new planes. They are being flown by pilots from Russia, Ukraine or Latvia and both are using Russian technicians for their maintenance.

http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1389.cfm

“WorldNetDaily has learned that Russian ‘mercenary’ pilots are flying advanced fighter jets for Ethiopia in its conflict with Eritrea. The report follows the confirmation that an Ethiopian Su-27 Flanker destroyed an Eritrea MiG-29 Fulcrum …” [Both planes were apparently flown by Russian pilots]

http://www.acig.info/CMS/?option=com_content&task=view&id=138&Itemid=47

The first Su-27 – dismantled at Krasnodar Air Base – departed for Ethiopia aboard an Antonov An-22 on 15 December. Due to the new Russian engagement in Ethiopia, the EtAF – now actually under command of retired Russian Gen. Yanakow Yoakim Ivanovich – was about to became a viable air force again: this was achieved foremost with help of a considerable number of Russian pilots, instructors and technicians, most of which were only recently retired from the Russian Air Force.

Eh, totally different doctrines. I mean, totally. The vast majority of Soviet fighter aircraft were wholly defensive in nature, short ranged, sparsely armed, designed to perform over WP/SU soil only, never far from base. They basically got locked in that mindset from WW2 and onwards.

As has been stated previously, things looked about the same east/west by the Korean war. Then it started diverging, more and more. So, they started off as point-defense fighters with cannons, later on chiefly “missile trucks” meant to be led by GC, fire missiles and then return to base. They were cheap, simple and not very versatile, had narrow engagement envelopes and almost no autonomous capability. They were highly numerous, though. Typically the entire plane was built around a single type of radar paired with a single type of missile… One might as well treat the entire “unit” as a sort of extended SAM-system, to be honest…

It wasn’t until the late 1970’s that began to change and they adopted a more “western” idea of what a fighter should be able to do, i.e. have some kind of autonomy, have decent range, display some versatility in role and loadout (some flavor of “multi-role” that is) and so on. Obviously this kind of versatility has huge implications for avionics, networking and so on, as well, and the Soviets lagged behind in that department exactly because of the choice not to develop such aircraft even when others did (and, obviously semiconductor development lagged behind over there as well, but that was a result of their dinosaurian economy that didn’t quite catch onto the IT revolution until the mid-1980’s).

Even with that change of heart though, the Su-27 and MiG-29 were dumbed down in their first decade of service with lackluster arsenals, bad radars (far below design specs) and over-reliance on GC (and their export versions, as per standard Soviet practice were even more dumbed down) and in the case of the MiG-29 baseline models – awful range. Their true potential was only beginning to be sniffed upon by the mid-1990’s, severely delayed needless to say, thanks to both doctrinal and economic factors. Truth be told, something akin to the Su-35S should have been around by the early 1990’s if it hadn’t been for all that jazz.

So, yeah. Western fighters were “superior” in most ways, except for when it comes to certain kinetics and what not (and some curious Soviet innovations such as nimble HMD-paired off-bore missiles and the networking schemes of the Foxhounds, for instance).

But then again the Soviets never actually tried to build something like an F-4 at the time. They stuck to putting a radar in front of an engine, slapping some wings onto it (typically re-used from previous designs, for simplicity’s sake) and then hang four huge honking missiles under it. Those off-the-shelf wings not working all that great? Slap on some wing fences and other quick fixes… Oh well, not the most elegant thing around but we can build a couple of thousands and totally block out any prospective attack on the motherland, all is well, then.

Worth mentioning though is that several of the Soviet design bureaus produced a big bunch of other, bolder and way more advanced designs but those didn’t get greenlighted. Because doctrine.

Actually I think the F-4N had HMD first – VTAS – in 1972, with the South African Mirage F1AZ second in 1975 and it was only after the South Africans succeeded in downing Soviet jets over Angola that the Soviets responded.

Again we have this ‘dumbed down’ claim, which has to be the most widely claimed and least proven argument in the whole of history.

The original question still stands.. can we judge the efficiency of Russian hardware based on results of the Vietnam war? Since the US threw in everything they had, F-100s, F-105s, F-4s, A-6s, A-7s, F-5s, B-52s, even F-111s and some experimental F-14s while the most sophisticated thing Vietnamese got were MiG-21MFs, I’d say we just can’t. End of story..

I’m yet to see what else the Russians could have thrown at it that would have changed things. All the other aircraft you mention the US threw at it just made it easier for the MiG-21 to get kills, since the rest were earlier designs that were inferior and the likes of the F-105s were fighter-bombers, yet still the MiG-21 came out below parity.

F-14s used in Vietnam War 1965-1973? It flew some combat patrols during evacuations in 1974-1976 but it was never actively involved in the actual war.