Albania && Mig-15’s
After all, all those Balkan jokes about Albanian military were not totally off the mark:
Albania’s antiquated air force of Soviet-designed MiG aircraft, which killed 35 Albanian pilots but no enemies, is finally on its way to the museum and the scrapheap
A satellite of Soviet Union and China during the first decades of the Cold War, the Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha was given a fleet that grew to 125 MiGs to repel what general Qazimi called “a classic total aggression” from the West.
The first MiG-15 squadron arrived from the Soviet Union in 1951 and it had seen action in Korea, said Perikli Teta, Albania’s air force engineer-in-chief for 17 years.
“You could still see where the bullet holes had been repaired,” Teta told Reuters. The 15s were followed in the 1970s and 1980s by scores of MiG-17s, or Frescoes in NATO parlance, and MiG-19s, known to the alliance as Farmers.
All have the stubby swept-back wings, cigar shaped fuselage and nose intake of the iconic communist Cold War interceptor.
Albanian pilots were praised in the government-controlled press but had little glory to their credit other than flying low down Tirana’s main boulevard, rattling windowpanes and startling citizens with their supersonic booms.
Teta said MiG flights were curtailed after the fall of communism in 1991, because Albania, Europe’s poorest country at that time, could not afford 1,000 litres of fuel per flight.
At the dawn of democracy, some sat forlorn under tattered canvas covers at Tirana’s Rinas airport, their wheels deep in mud and their rusty wings tilted… (full story)
September 7th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
Are you there?
Wow that’s a nice post .