Word: 23s
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Whether he knew it or not, Captain Chun and the other 268 innocent travelers on his airliner soon were in trouble. Somehow, Flight 007 had passed those lines, invisible in the sky but so clearly etched on maps, that mark forbidden airspace. The Soviets scrambled MiG-23s, their widely deployed supersonic jet fighter, and Sukhoi-15s, a slightly older but nonetheless lethal interceptor, to follow the 747. Japanese and American intelligence sources later figured that at least eight of the single-seat fighters pursued the relatively slow-moving airliner...
...Soviets have been equally generous in providing more conventional arms to the Syrians. Since the Lebanese conflict began, the Soviets have supplied Syria with about 100 fighter aircraft to replace those lost in dogfights over the Bekaa Valley. The bulk of the new aircraft are advanced MiG-23s. Some 300 to 400 T-62 and T-72 tanks have been added to the Syrian arsenal, well in excess of the number of older and smaller T-54s and T-55s lost in Lebanon. The Soviets have also provided about 200 armored personnel carriers, and between 600 and 800 trucks...
...intelligence network around the globe has picked up fragments of Soviet anguish about how come the Israelis, flying American F-15s and 16s over Lebanon, shot down Syrians flying MiG-23s at a ratio of 83 to zip. And how come those SAM-6s and 8s in the Bekaa Valley, the same kind of missile that devastated the Israelis in the 1973 war, could hit only one enemy plane this time...
...traveling toward the Israeli plane at 2,000 m.p.h., the jet's ECM would have singled it out for intense electronic jamming, trying to overcome the SAM'S own antijamming system to send the missile veering off course. If one of the Syrian MiG-21s and MiG-23s had fired a Soviet Atoll missile at an Israeli attacker, the same ECM beaming might have "spoofed" the weapon and forced it harmlessly off course...
Syria's MiG-21s, MiG-23s and MiG-25s, although relatively stripped-down export models, do have ECM gadgets, early-warning systems and air-to-air missiles. But their electronics are not as precise and powerful as the U.S.-Israeli counterparts. Israel also had available an even more powerful electronic back-up system: four U.S.-built E-2C Hawkeye surveillance planes, each able to track 250 enemy aircraft up to 300 miles away. In addition, Israel's pilots are among the best in the world. No fighter pilots have more intensive training-in ground practice with computerized simulators...