Aaaah finally finished reading it. So. Here’s my review. The chapters are:
1.The origin of the family. 47 pages. Ye-2,-4,-5 and -50 (jet and rocket powered). Some pics of the Ye-50/1 crash and of the pressure suit used (cool fishbowl helmet with a flat pane) have been added since the Aerofax.
2.Off to a fine start. 37 pages. MiG-21F and F-13
3.Interceptors. 32 pages. MiG-21PF, PFS and PFM. Distinguishing a PFS from a PFM may be difficult if Gordon is right but he didn’t care about that in the pictures he puts. Wide chord single piece canopied planes are always ‘early PFMs’…
4.Mass production. 65 pages. R, S, SM, M, MF, bis, upgrades
5.Trainers. 19 pages. U, US, UM.
6.Experiments and projects. 35 pages. Ye-8, Ye-7PD, MiG-21I. Nice quote from Mosolov telling how he almost died because of the terrible Ye-8 engine problems.
7.Beyond the great wall. 91 pages. Refer to Deino’s post.
8.In Soviet Air Force service. 17 pages. Cuban crisies and Afghanistan mostly.
9.MiG-21 at war.43 pages. Keith Dexter may be the author of this chapter as the text is more scholar : brief description of the conflicts, some dates and figures. A lot better than what could be found in the Aerofax or the crappy Warbirdtech.
10.Face to face with adversary. 7 pages. F-5E was evaluated at compared to the MiG-21bis. The Tiger II was better at low speed, nicer to maintain and fly. Nice info about the tendency of single engined twin air intaked jets to suffer from compressor stall.
11.MiG-21 in detail. 41pages. Looks very very similar to the corresponding chapter in the Aerofax book. The size of the intake is still the same between a PF/…/MF and a bis which is wrong according to fellow ARCers that know the MiG-21. Ok ok the difference is just 5cms in diameter… There’s a game included in this chapter: there are plenty of detail pics than are just enlarged part of other photos of the book. Find the original picture in the book !
12.MiG-21 operators. 246 pages. Probably written be Keith Dexter again. The units and what versions were used are described. Nice info about what were MiG-21PFMs, MiG-21SPSs and SPS-Ks in DDR, MiG-21MA in Czechoslovakia, MiG-21RFM in Romania, etc.
Yefim Gordon is more a compiler than a writer. He sometimes (or always ?) forgets to double-check what he writes and he can hardly be called an historian: sources not told, no bibliography or references chapters. The ‘at war’ and ‘operators’ chapters probably have not been written by Gordon and that’s good: I’ve found them to be quite nice !
This book is not for historians and people who spend their life accumulating documentation on the MiG-21.They’ll probably find plenty of incoherences in it, copy/pastes from other documents, the same boring pictures that can be found anywhere else, etc. Ok. But what if the reader knows all these things, that he doesn’t want to accumulate plenty of books and spend all his days in front of the computer ? What if he knows that Yefim Gordon books aren’t always reliable but that he likes to have a big fat MiG-21 book with (often poor quality) pictures of exotic planes ? This reader will probably like the FRA book even if it doesn’t answer all the questions that he may ask himself. I recommend this book.
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