Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15UTI 'Midget' | Planes of Fame Air Museum

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Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15UTI 'Midget'

HISTORY

The prototype of the MiG-15 (NATO code name "Fagot") made its maiden flight on 30 December 1947. The first production aircraft flew exactly one year later.
It was in the frozen skies of Korea that the MiG-15 proved one of the most formidable fighters of its generation. On 8 November 1950, MiGs tangled with USAF F-80Cs. Lt. Russell Brown downed one of the communist fighters in history's first jet-to-jet dogfight. Despite this initial success, the performance of the swept-wing MiG was far superior to that of straight-wing aircraft like the F-80 and the Navy's F9F Panther. The 4th F.I.W. with its F-86A Sabres was rushed to the Far East, clashing with MiGs for the first time in December.
For the next two and a half years Sabres and MiGs (frequently flown by Soviet and other Eastern Bloc pilots) dueled in the skies over the Yalu River in an area called "MiG Alley." At the end of the Korean War, Sabre pilots claimed a 14:1 (later revised to 7:1) kill ratio over their opponents. This lopsided total is usually attributed to the superior training given to USAF pilots.
The West got its first close-up look at a Mig-15 in September 1953 when a North Korean pilot defected. MiG 15s served with virtually every air force in the communist bloc, including those of Soviet client states in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Some soldiered on into the 1970s. Over 17,000 aircraft were built in the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Thousands more were built in China.
The Museum's MiG-15UTI is a two-seat, dual-control trainer of the MiG-15 fighter. Many of these trainers remained in service until the 1990s.
The famous "first man in space", Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, died in a 1968 crash of a MiG-15UTI crash due to bad communications and poor weather.