Fulcrum Read online

  Short-landing capability was one of the new aircraft’s main requirements. The Mikoyan test pilots demonstrated this by a crude ploy. With PVO and VVS generals assembled at the test center, a demonstration pilot flared a prototype for landing and popped his drag chute with his wheels still three feet above the runway. Naturally the plane’s landing roll was short. But the generals did not notice that the prototype had blown all three tires and damaged its gear. They were so impressed that they actually commented that the new aircraft should be considered a possible candidate for an aircraft carrier fighter.

  As we trained that spring and summer on the Ruslan ranges, I had to constantly keep all of the aircraft’s sensitive characteristics in mind. One afternoon of blustery showers when there was a fluky crosswind blowing on the active landing runway, I executed a missed approach only ten seconds from flareout. I rammed the throttle ahead to full military power, raised the gear and flaps, and climbed away.

  “Bird,” I called the tower, indicating that I had seen birds flying across the runway. This had not been the case. But I had recognized that for some reason, I had been just too fast to land and risked provoking a goat. I went around the circuit and set up for landing again. Once I landed, Captain Shalunov, my link leader, met me on the apron.

  “What’s going on, Sanya?” he asked. “I didn’t see any flocks of birds out there.”

  I was stowing my helmet and oxygen mask in my flight bag and collecting my tactical navigation charts. I rose to face him. “Comrade Captain,” I admitted, “for some reason I just felt that approach was not safe.”

  Instead of a reprimand, Shalunov smiled and slapped me on the shoulder. “Good job,” he said. “Never forget, caution is not fear.”

  Even though the MiG-23 was a bastard of an airplane to master, I qualified as a Third Class pilot on the aircraft in August 1983. Our training shifted to Karachala, an isolated base in Azerbaijan. I had managed to rack up a full year’s worth of sorties in only eight months.

  After qualifying, we began to fly at night. I had no particular problem with the disorientation that can sometimes lead to hazardous vertigo, which afflicted some of the junior pilots during their early night flying. Again I was fortunate in having excellent instructors. Captain Shalunov helped me build on the skills that I had learned from Lieutenant Tveretin and Captain Bogorotsky. And, as always, I kept my own personal flight logbook in which I emphasized my shortcomings.

  Then the Soviet military was rocked by a scandal of unprecedented scale. On September 1, 1983, a PVO Su-15 interceptor shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 jumbo jet with 269 people on board over the Sea of Okhotsk between the Soviet Union’s Sakhalin Island and the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. There were no survivors. The plane had been en route to Seoul from New York with a layoveayover in Anchorage, Alaska. A number of important Americans, including a congressman, were among those killed.

  Pr01 and the Vremya news broadcast from Moscow television stressed that the airliner had flown straight into Soviet airspace above sensitive defense installations and was flying in darkness without aerial navigation lights. According to Moscow, the Korean pilot also refused to respond to repeated warnings from both civilian and military Soviet air traffic controllers.

  Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the deputy defense minister who had tried to undercut the PVO in his reforms of the early 1980s, was now given the task of publicly defending the Air Defense Force. Ogarkov led an unprecedented internationally televised press conference at the Kremlin, which continued the same condemnation of the Korean pilot initiated by Pravda. Ogarkov’s explanation for the Korean pilot’s strange behavior was that the South Korean airliner might have been working in conjunction with an American Air Force RC-135 electronic spy plane. He stressed that the PVO radars had tracked the intruder all the way south from the heavily defended Kamchatka Peninsula, hundreds of miles to the north. The marshal used elaborate graphs and charts to demonstrate that the airliner had penetrated deeply into sensitive Soviet airspace despite repeated warnings from Soviet ground controllers to turn away.

  After the widely publicized appearance by Ogarkov, Dmitri Ustinov, the Soviet Defense Minister, angrily chastised both the Americans and South Koreans for having endangered the civilian passengers so recklessly.

  Most of the pilots in my regiment accepted the official version of this unfortunate event. But as VVS officers, we were scornful of the PVO pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Gennadi Osipovich, who had destroyed the airliner with two missiles. Osipovich’s Su-15 was a typical PVO interceptor, a fast-climbing, rather unmaneuverable fuel guzzler with a short combat radius. The Su-15 was little more than a high-altitude missile platform. Some of my older colleagues dismissed PVO interceptor pilots as “robots” because they slavishly followed the radar vectors and weapons-release commands of the GCI ground controllers. Apparently this was the case in the Korean airliner incident.

  My own reaction was that Osipovich certainly had not done everything possible to protect both Soviet territory and innocent lives. Then I began to hear a starkly different version of the events over Sakhalin Island. The Defense Ministry announced that a second Su-15 and a VVS MiG-23 had also been scrambled and were trailing Osipovich when he shot down the airliner. In fact, my link leader, Captain Shalunov, actually recognized the MiG-23 pilot on television. The officer was a friend of his named Litvinov. The pilots in my squadron began to whisper that there was something wrong with the official explanation of the airliner shoot-down. Nobody believed that the Americans would jeopardize hundreds of innocent civilian passengers for a routine espionage gain. The VVS base was in the north of the island. If at least two Su-15s and one MiG-23 had been scrambled, why was the airliner destroyed south of Sakhalin Island?

  Later we discovered the shocking truth. A GCI officer named Andrei, reassigned from Sakhalin Island, came to our regiment for a familiarization course. Over dinner one night, he revealed what really happened to the Korean airliner.

  Ten days before the incident, Andrei said, an Arctic gale had knocked down the early warning radar antennas on the Kamchatka Peninsula, depriving eastern Siberia and Sakhalin Island of the “air picture” needed to vector interceptors against intruders. Moscow put incredible pressure on the PVO to repair these antennas immediately to regain air-defense coverage for the Soviet Far East. Finally Far East PVO officers reported to Moscow that the radars were up and running. But the antennas were still lying broken on the tundra.

  When the Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace, it passed right over the strategic peninsula and on toward Sakhalin Island without being properly tracked. One air base on the peninsula did scramble interceptors, but the GCI controllers could not give the fighters the correct vector or altitude for a successful intercept. The PVO on Sakhalin Island did not receive precise data on the “intruder.” The first firm indication they had of KAL Flight 007 was when the airliner flew directly over the base in the center of the island. But the local radar operators did not speak English, so they couldn’t talk to the Korean captain using the international distress radio frequencies of 121.5 or 243 MHz.

  By the time they relayed this information to PVO Far East headquarters in Habarovsk in Siberia, the Korean Boeing 747 had already passed over Sakhalin and was on its way out of Soviet airspace. The order to destroy the unidentified narushitel, “violator,” came from Habarovsk in a panicky attempt to conceal the fact that the northern early warning radars were still inoperable.

  “They killed 269 people to save their own ass from Moscow,” Andrei said bitterly.

  I didn’t know how to answer. Finally I replied, “Those PVO bastards are a bunch of dinosaurs.”

  But I knew the fault lay deeper in our military system.

  However, I soon had more personal events to consider than the poor leadership of the PVO and cover-ups in Moscow. On November 6, the eve of the annual celebration of the Great November Revolution, five of us from the Armavir MiG-23 program received transfer orders to the 512th Regiment at
Vaziani, southeast of Tbilisi. The 512th was definitely not a Potemkin’s village charade, as Colonel Homenko’s unit had been. My new outfit had earned the proud designation “Combat Leadership Regiment.” Almost all of its pilots had First Class ratings, and the unit’s overall combat readiness and skill level was outstanding. Much of this was due to the efforts of our new division commander, Major General Anosov, who worked closely with the talented and energetic regimental commander, a full colonel named Boris “Bimba” Rinchinov.

  My new commander was exceptional in many ways. He was a Buryat, one of the Siberian Mongol ethnic groups who lived around Lake Baikal, and had been raised in a State orphanage. Some Buryats had mixed Russian blood and did not appear especially Asian. But Colonel Rinchinov was a pure Buryat. With his big head, flat nose, and barrel chest, he looked like a Mongol horseman from the Golden Horde. For him to have reached the rank of full colonel in command of a Combat Leader Regiment in the VVS — a service that had only a handful of non-Slav pilots — was a testimony to his abilities and dynamism. He was a Sniper pilot in his early forties who had graduated near the top of his class from the Kacha academy. His advancement had been rapid, and his career had prospered from combat service as a MiG-21 adviser in Egypt during the protracted Arab-Israeli wars.

  Bimba Rinchinov was both a terrific pilot and a popular leader. But unlike Homenko, he was blunt and demanding. He recognized that pilots were basically hardworking and ambitious, and wanted nothing more than the opportunity to fly. During our first meeting with him at Vaziani, Richinov made it clear that we would, indeed, get that opportunity.

  The colonel demonstrated his leadership style by dispatching a four-engine An-12 transport from Vaziani to Tskhakaya to pick up the new lieutenants, their families, and their household effects. When we landed, late at night, the entire regimental senior staff was there to meet us. They had trucks laid on to transport our furniture and trunks to our new quarters. This was a far cry from the 176th.

  After we came back to Vaziani from our mandatory annual leave, the colonel himself greeted us in his office.

  “I know you fellows,” he said, smiling as he looked us over. His expression was much more open than the habitual cunning blandness of Homenko. “You love flying more than sex. But I promise you that you’re going to be flying so much here that you won’t have any energy left to chase women.”

  That was exactly the kind of reception we’d been hoping for. This was the real Air Force, not a holding tank for staff rats.

  I was assigned to the 3rd Squadron along with four of my Armavir colleagues. The squadron commander was an energetic young major named Nikolai Kuchkov. He was one of those rare men who are literally natural pilots. Where other experienced pilots might have to sweat through a tricky ground-attack or air-combat maneuver, Kuchkov could perform effortlessly with near perfection. He was an intense, demanding taskmaster, who expected absolute precision from all his pilots, including the new lieutenants who were struggling through their rating sorties toward Second Class.

  The 512th Regiment had an excellent simulator center, where we carefully rehearsed all our training maneuvers before actually flying the sorties. Here Major Kuchkov often displayed his incredible flying skill. The simulator had a cockpit mock-up with a computer analysis station beside it. Using an electronic stylus, he could trace the flight path of a desired maneuver — anything from a shallow landing approach to a high-speed spiraling climb to an intercept. Then the students were expected to “fly” the simulator, following the optimal flight path as closely as possible. The only pilot who could actually match the original tracing, every time, was Kuchkov himself.

  I was determined to do my best for this brilliant officer. So every free moment I had I spent in the simulator building working on my combat maneuvers. The young lieutenants in my squadron began calling me “Spare Parts” Zuyev because of the time I spent in the darkened simulator cubicle. “Perfection is impossible, Sasha,” Kuchkov told me one day when I had been sweating in the simulator for over an hour. “Excellence is good enough.”

  Major Kuchkov was just as good, if not better, in a real cockpit. Most pilots occasionally experienced varying degrees of disorientation, especially flying at night while working “inside” the cockpit, adjusting the radar or arming weapons systems. We were prepared for this and always recovered quickly, usually by focusing outside the cockpit on the horizon. But Kuchkov seemed always aware of his aircraft’s altitude and position.

  He also always appeared aware of the other aircraft in the formation. Pilots swore he could swivel his head 360 degrees. And if you weren’t tucked up in the proper zveno formation, be it combat trail or line-abreast, Kuchkov immediately let you know about it.

  The older pilots in the squadron called him “the mind reader.” To us young lieutenants, he was “the Professor.”

  However, he was certainly not unnecessarily critical or needlessly sarcastic. Within a year, we could all be in combat. Our regiment’s 2nd Squadron departed for combat duty at the big Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan while I was training for my Second Class rating. Kuchkov realized he was working us hard, virtually pushing us to our limits. But he also understood that combat would be tougher than any training.

  One day in the squadron ready room, he held up a sheet of stationery in one hand and a smaller notepad in the other. “This is the division safety inspector,” he said, hefting the stationery page. “And this,” he said, hiding the notepad behind the larger sheet, “is combat readiness.” He looked at us hard. “Safety will always get in the way of combat training.” He reversed the sheet of paper and the small notepad. “We’re going to turn things around and the devil take the safety inspector.”

  From that day on, we began flying in almost any weather, day or night. There were no safety inspectors on the forward bases in Afghanistan, Kuchkov assured us, and the Mujahedin did not wait for good weather to attack our troops. Some days we flew below minimum ceilings through the dense smog from the local steel mill, shooting ILS landings in visibility so poor you couldn’t see the runway until almost touchdown. The division was always on our backs, but we flew anyway.

  A typical flying day began at 0530, with an orderly banging on the door of our two-man rooms, announcing that we had good flying weather. Unlike his counterpart at Ruslan, Colonel Rinchinov trusted our professional meteorologist to predict flying conditions. In this regiment we began flying much closer to minimums of visibility and ceiling than they did in the 176th. And as our hectic training schedule progressed, we were soon flying in marginal conditions that were often well below the minimums. Major Kuchkov was fond of pointing out that the Afghan Mujahedin preferred cloudy weather and snowstorms for their rocket attacks.

  At 0600 we sat down to a “light” breakfast in the officers’ dining room, a meal that always included fresh eggs, sausage, cheese, and rolls. As in other VVS regiments, the pilots’ flight ration was very substantial.

  We drew our Makarov 9mm pistols at 0620. I was very proud of my Makarov, having made sure that the gun was a top-quality specimen when it was issued, and having adjusted any minor flaws with the armorers after I had practice-fired it several times. I knew that the light automatic was not a match for an infantry weapon, but I wanted to be able to hit what I aimed at.

  The regular flight-day medical test was next on our schedule. The regimental doctor examined every pilot flying, verifying blood pressure, temperature, pulse, and respiration. Any pilot suffering from a cold or the flu was automatically excused from training. We knew that the doctor also checked us for signs of drinking. Each regiment had its own traditions about alcohol, but most frowned on any drinking whatsoever during a period of flight training that could last as long as a month. The doctors were always prodding and probing us to make sure we had not suffered internal damage from high-G flight and giving us theoretical instructions on how to prepare for the stress of high Gs. But Major Kuchkov gave me much more practical advice, based on his own years of experience in je
t fighters.

  “During a training cycle, Zuyev,” he told me, “don’t drink a drop of alcohol. And stay away from sex, even a little bit.”

  “I’m not sure what a ‘little bit’ of sex is, Comrade Major,” I replied with a straight face.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Kuchkov said with a smile.

  His point was well taken, however. Drinking dulled your reflexes, and the effects of a hangover could last well into the next day. I was surprised to discover in intelligence briefings that NATO pilots, especially the Americans and British, almost ritually frequented their officers’ club bars every evening after flying. They apparently considered drinking a sign of masculinity. At the same time, we were told, they believed Soviet pilots suffered from serious alcohol problems. Certainly we drank in groups, but only during stand-down periods to celebrate the completion of a successful training cycle. Here in Georgia, excellent cognac was cheap and bountiful. But we stayed away from it while we were flying. If the regimental doctor even suspected smelling alcohol on your breath on a flight day, you would be grounded and severely disciplined.

  My friend Dmitri, who had studied the American military so closely, was now with us in Vaziani. He explained that U.S. pilots were forbidden to take a drink twelve hours before flying. But, he said, they were notorious for drinking hard right up to that deadline, and were often badly hung over when they strapped themselves into their cockpits. In the Soviet Air Force a pilot would be grounded for even sipping a beer a full thirty-six hours before flying.