Message posted by casper_n (Member since 01/24/2011) on December 15, 2022 at 16:29:44 PST:
There are lots of true answers here. To say they were flown out by deserters is true, but incomplete. Some were flown out of the USSR by defectors and then acquired by the US or loaned to the US by the countries that received the defectors. Some were purchased from former Soviet Bloc countries after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Some were sold by Russia as exports and then acquired by the US (from some African countries, if I recall correctly). And, according to Clint Eastwood, one was stolen right out of its hangar at a Russian military test base. (That last part is the plot of an 80s movie called Firefox, in case you missed the joke.) the book Red Eagles covers how several of the older jets were acquired. All the modern stuff, I'm sure, is "classified."
In Reply to: Re: Russian fighter aircraft posted by Ty Stout on December 15, 2022 at 7:57:46 PST:
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