Oleg Zabluda's blog
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
 
Viktor Belenko (1947 - present) defected to US on Sep 6, 1976, by flying his MiG-25 "Foxbat" jet to Japan.
Viktor Belenko (1947 - present) defected to US on Sep 6, 1976, by flying his MiG-25 "Foxbat" jet to Japan.

In 1970's the Americans scared themselves by merging 3 different real Soviet airplanes into an imaginary super-fighter with the speed of Mig-25 (Mach 2.5), maneuverability of Mig-23 (8 g, Thrust/weight = 0.9) and the numbers of Mig-21 (11,000 built). Americans are prone to such self-scares, and had a number of them during cold war (imaginary missile gap, etc). As always, American response was to build an airplane, better in all those categories. That was F-15 "Eagle", Mach 2.7, Thrust/weight=1.12, 9g (pilot limited) [1]

That was way beyond what the Soviets could actually do, and when Belenko learned about it, he started thinking of defecting:

"if socialism is so much better then capitalism, why their technology is so much better then ours" and "bad people can't be making such aircraft" (page 73). He was also thinking of  F-14 "Tomcat" and B-1 "Bone".

After Belenko, that's how we judge people as well. By their technology

[1] Ironically, Mig-25 was utterly useless, created only in response to the cancelled American B-70 "Valkyrie", so it was a double-self-scare.

http://books.google.com/books/about/MiG_pilot.html?id=qpIsAAAAYAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko
http://www.amazon.com/Mig-Pilot-Escape-Lieutenant-Belenko/dp/0070038503/

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