92N6 should be the GRAVE STONE engagement radar, not a TIN SHIELD or CLAM SHELL replacement; the 96L6 was advertised as the 76N6 replacement system.

Here’s the current Syrian SAM site map. The new SA-2 range ring should be obvious.

Blade Runner’s one of my favourite films but it only skims the surface of the plot of the book it’s based on (well worth a read).

Unfortunately that is common in many of the Phillip K. Dick short stories and books that have been made into films. Too bad, the man was a fantastic sci-fi author.

I find much of his writing to be the best on the subject (Russian/Soviet aviation). Without Yefim Gordon’s books, I think we would have a much shallower knowledge of Russian/Soviet aviation.

Hey now, don’t sell Piotr Butowski and Andrey Fomin short 😀 Fomin’s FLANKER book is absolutely fantastic. PiBu needs to get back to writing books and off of the magazine bit for a while if you ask me! That being said, for the most part I do agree that Yefim Gordon’s books do make for some of the best references available on Soviet/Russian aircraft types. Look at the Tu-144. The only other book on the type published in the West was Howard Moon’s much earlier work, which while interesting, lacked a lot of the story as it was not available at the time.

I recently bought his Red Star book on the Il-12 and Il-14.

I’ve got a whole mess of those volumes myself. There is a ton of good stuff to be found in them.

The book is fairly thorough and covers a family of aircraft that wouldn’t ever have gotten an English language treatment had it not been for Gordon.

That’s true of damn near all of the Red Star volumes actually, which is why they’re so valuable as reference sources for the most part.

Then there’s what SOC was talking about.

You got it in one, excellent example. Had he simply worded that bit differently it would have come across far, far better. Western authors get chastized for being biased, but Gordon gets away with this scot free?

I think the observations you point out are true up to a level, he does take earlier works and rehash them, however he includes new parts.

My complaint, specifically directed at the WarbirdTECH fiasco, is that he is merely reprinting, verbatim, what he previously published. He added a few new pages and a few new images at the end and sold it as a new book, advertised as being “up-to-date”, which it most clearly was not.

The so call “myths” or “Pravda reports” are in contradiction to what many westerners want to hear.

Which makes them no more accurate. Go back and re-read the part of the MiG-23 book, you should see what I mean. It’s not even so much his account of the events, but rather his tone of phrase and select wording.

However i guess he was leaning to a possible MiG-29 and F-117 combat.

Which never happened. Now, when he published the first Airlife book on the MiG-29, the story about the SA_3 battery commander had not been made public yet, so he was free to speculate.

If he is right or not in what he reports is up to the reader up to a degree to believe it because any way the only thing he does is include Russian reports that usually appear as combat accounts of their aircraft.

If he is pulblishing things that are 100% untrue merely because it makes the topic of his book seem that much more appealing, what does that say about him? That goes for any author, not just Gordon.

I have quite an eclectic taste in music from Pavarotti to Muddy Waters to Tony Bennett to the Beatles but i can’t stand the tripe the kids of today call music..that bloody Rap and Heavy rock rubbish should be left in the jungle where it belongs

Did you just say that rap music belongs in the jungle? 😮 Don’t know if I’d have gone there, given the way it could be interpreted!

I do agree that the metal scene today is only producing mass-marketable nu-metal bands which are derivative and uninspiring. I can’t remember the last new band I heard that was actually good.

Why not post the update? :diablo:

I’ll get to it after I finish the damn article I’ve been trying to finish for my blog for the past two weeks 😀

The main problems with Yefim Gordon are his lack of attention to detail and his fervent anti-Western bias.

In the former category, he fails to identify the Su-30MK2 images as such in his new FLANKER book, he has apparently totally ignored the R-27P/EP ARMs, he has consistently gotten the export users wrong regarding the FULCRUM and FLANKER series, he propagates the disproven myth that a MiG-29 shot down the F-117A over the Balkans…etc.

In the latter, it almost seems like he’s writing for Pravda in some cases. Pick up the Aerofax book on the MiG-23 and read his account of the Libyan FLOGGER shootdown by the USN.

Then there’s the fact that he continuously recycles old information. Look at his FLANKER and FULCRUM WarbirdTECH volumes. The text is lifted right out of his old Airlife books published many years before.

He does have a lot of good stuff though, so if you pick up one of his books with a clear mind and an awareness of his faults, you’ll get a lot more out of them. His Tu-144 book and his Tu-160 book are first-rate and represent the authority on those two programs at this point in time. The MiG-31 FRA book is very well done as well, although some of his Tomcat comparisons could use a little more work, and you have to wonder why there are no Kazakhstani FOXHOUND images as he is clearly not above liftng images straight from the internet (look at the PLAAF FLANKER images in his FRA FLANKER book).