My interest in early jets:
I always found the early Migs to be interesting planes as they as well as all the allies after WW2 worked fast to implement the new technologies that the Germans developed.
I even designed a paper version back in the mid 1980’s on a CAD/CAM system. Kind of simple by today’s standards, but was enough for me to appreciate how difficult it is to design a good kit.
I also built many Soviet jets in plastic
Here is a picture of my almost 80 of them in 1/72 scale.
Aircraft background.
The Mig 15 draws its lines from the German TA-183 Huckbein with a major change being the placement of the wings in the mid fuselage instead of the shoulder ( like the Lavochkin La-15 ). The Soviets finally selected Mig over Lavochkin for their front line fighter .
I used the OKB Mikoyan book by Yefim Gordon as a reference.
The line sarted with the flight of the I-310 prototype in 1947 ( barely 2 years post the end of WW2 ) . The Mig 15 morphed into the two seater UTI as well as many derivatives and testbeds. It then got improved into the Mig-17 versions and that was the end of that line of design as the next Mig-19 only retained the nose intake layout.
The Migs were manufactured under license for many years in Poland, Czechoslovakia and China. All of the Warsaw pact members flew it as well as practically every non aligned country in the world.
Mig design bureau
Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
my pictures of the actual aircraft.
I have seen Migs in many locations and museums. These are taken at the Kracow Poland aviation museum in 2009:
and in 2006 at the Oshkosh airshow:
More to come.
Isaac