ALUMINIUM FALCON - The MiG-15 Was An Underestimated Soldier Aircraft That Terrorised The West

The historical record of fighter aircraft necessarily simplifies their qualities and capabilities. Reputations build down the generations. Some fighters are appreciated like fine wines, classy and ageless. Their meticulously crafted details are loved and obsessed over.

The MiG-15 is not one of those aircraft. It is remembered as an agricultural fighter. A tractor of the sky. A sufficiently dangerous antagonist to make poster-boy Sabre seem that much more impressive, but fundamentally a crude and ugly plane.

When it first emerged NATO called it the Falcon. Then they decided that this was too complementary and re-dubbed it the Fagot. A meatball made of minced offcuts and offal. That’s how they wanted it to be seen. A German design, a British engine, various obsolete Soviet and copied Luftwaffe components mashed together.

That’s not this story. This is the story of a weapon of war. A soldier aircraft. On one side of its genetic lineage, it is the ultimate realisation of early 1940s jet fighter design German philosophy. On the other it is a deliberately simple device intended to revolutionise an entire air arm in one strategic move.

Whereas its counterpart in the US started out with straight wings and muddled its way to greatness, the MiG-15 was the realisation of a single clear vision. When the West encountered it for the first time it terrorised them. It effectively ended the front line careers of the B29 and straight wing fighters across the board. Only the Sabre could match it in the air.

This is the story of the Soviet Union’s Aluminium Falcon. The MiG-15. Alongside my Sabre deep dive, it serves as a jumping off point to analysing the statistics of swept wing jet combat in the Korean War. I hope I've done justice to an aircraft that I personally regard as one of the greats.

Notes and Sources:

The companion F-86 Sabre Deep Dive is here:    • SABRE: Development And Evolution Of T...  

Amongst other books, I found myself referring to Yefim Gordon's Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15: The Soviet Union's Long-Lived Korean War Fighter more than most

Also:
Walkaround: MiG-15 Fagot by Hans-Heiri Stapfer
MiG-15 In Action, also by Hans-Heiri Stapfer
MiG-15 Aces of the Korean War by Leonid Krylov
Red Devils over the Yalu: A Chronicle of Soviet Aerial Operations in the Korean War 1950-53 by Igor Seidov
F-80 Shooting Star Units Over Korea by Warren Thompson