MiG-15: The First Great Soviet Interceptor

Coming out of WWII, America's Air Force was the undisputed champ of the skies. That all changed during the Korean War when Soviet forces unveiled the MiG-15, a sprightly swept-wing interceptor that would go on to spark decades of dogfights.

The very first turbo jet fighter to come out of the Soviet Union was the MiG-9. It was developed by Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich (MiG, get it?) and first flew in 1946. However, it's engine, being reverse-engineered from a German BMW 003, couldn't produce much more than 2,500 pounds of thrust. The under-powered engine, along with flimsy straight wings, made the MiG-9 really unstable at speed. So, Mikoyan and Gurevich went back to the drawing board.

They scrapped the straight wing design in favor of ones that swept back at a 35-degree angle, added swept tail wings, a pressurized cockpit and ejection seat (both firsts for Soviet aircraft), and rerouted the tailpipe to the very end of the plane. These modifications all helped to better stabilize the plane, now dubbed the I-310, but did nothing to remedy the sickly engine. Luckily, the British Labor government at the time was more than happy to sell the Soviets a bit of better technology.







While the MiG-15 design later evolved into the MiG-17, the first Soviet supersonic fighter, the model 15 itself is still the most-produced fighter jet of all time. Some 12,000 units were produced in the USSR alone and another 18,000 are estimated to have been manufactured by Soviet satellite states like Czechoslovakia. [Fighter Planes - Wikipedia - National AF Museum - Warbird Alley - Global Security - US Air and Space Museum - Image: Tudor Hulubei / Hulubei]