Word: mig
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Johnson responded quickly by using new jet engines and a low-wing, streamlined airframe to produce the F-80 Shooting Star, America's first operational combat jet, which became the workhorse of the Korean War. In the first all-jet air battle, it shot down a Soviet MIG-15, the brainchild of Johnson's Russian archrivals, Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich. Kelly achieved an even more impressive performance from the Mach 2 F-104 Starfighter ("the missile with a man in it"), which is only now about to be phased out as NATO's dominant plane...
...reach it; it was only when Francis Gary Powers' U-2 was downed by a new Soviet missile in 1960 that the world learned of the spy plane's existence. Johnson's double delta YF-12 interceptor remained unchallenged for a decade until Mikoyan's MIG-25 became operational...
...even the MIG-25 cannot fully match Johnson's masterwork, the sleek SR-71 Blackbird, a plane that can fly so high (100,000 ft.) and so fast (2,000 m.p.h. plus) that it was able to cruise near Peking's first H-bomb explosion over the Lob Nor desert of northeastern Sinkiang province in 1967. It took photographs and gathered data without being damaged by the blast. After such daring forays, SR-71 pilots would decorate their fuselages with the silhouette of a cobra-like poisonous snake called the habu, which inhabits a Pacific island where...
SYRIA lost 103 of its 200 MIG-21 jets in the October war, and 36 of its 80 MIG-17s. The U.S.S.R. has not only replaced all the downed planes with fast MIG-21s but given the Syrians 45 MIG-23 fighter-bombers, the Russian equivalents of the vaunted U.S. F-4 Phantoms. To fly them, the Syrians have cadres of Soviet-trained Cuban and North Korean pilots. In addition, the Russians have given the Syrians 30 Scud ground-to-ground missiles, which have a range of 180 miles and could hit both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv from positions well...
...chosen because the NATO purchasers do not want to rely on the neutral Swedes for so important a component of their national arsenals. This left the French and Americans, whose planes are comparable in size, speed and cost. All three compete favorably with the Soviet Union's new MIG-23 Flogger and even with the MIG-25 Foxbat at altitudes up to 50,000 ft. Still, there are major differences (see chart...