Word: 86s
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Defensive fighter planes-perhaps 90% of the U.S.S.R.'s air force-are another matter. Obsolescent U.S. F-86s armed with Sidewinders so far have been far superior to the MIG-17s, as Free China's pilots have proved (TIME, Oct. 6). Nobody yet knows how well the U.S.'s F-100 series might do against the newest Russian fighter, the MIG-21. Nor is there much fresh information about the new Soviet all-weather, delta-winged interceptor. The big Russian interceptor force is helped in its job by what may be the world's best...
...their defense ministers-a fact that led to a rush of speculation. Gist of the rumors: Communist China was again preparing to attack Formosa or the Nationalist-held offshore island chains of Quemoy and Matsu. Later events gave some substance to the speculation: Communist MIG-17s and Nationalist F-86s and F-845 began tangling more often above Formosa Strait; Communist gunners began to pound the islands, last week put down thousands of shells in two hours of the heaviest bombardment that Quemoy has ever taken...
Producer-Director Dick Powell wisely spends a minimum amount of time munching on this knackwurst, trains his cameras as much as possible on the stirring capers of F-86s banging about the sky. He would have been even smarter to hire some tanker planes and never bring the jets down...
...continued to honor its own commitments. Though the Reds had neither jet planes nor operational airfields to handle them in North Korea at war's end, they had more than 500 jet fighters and 25 airfields there by this spring. (The U.N. has had six squadrons of F-86s on station since the armistice.) The two U.S. divisions in South Korea made do with old weapons, some no longer included in U.S. Army basic training. North Koreans and Chinese armored themselves in all the latest Soviet hardware...
...Navy have all the answers, even though peninsular warfare is traditionally the Navy's meat. Item: at this critical moment, the Navy had no aircraft to meet the Russian MIG, had to make the humiliating decision to stay out of MIG Alley. (While the Air Force F-86s knocked MIGs out at a rate of 13 to 1.) Obviously, what was needed was a force to fight any kind of war, big, medium-sized or little...