The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (Микоян-Гуревич МиГ-21; NATO reporting name "Fishbed") is a Soviet supersonic jet fighter with a very thin delta wing and a conventional tail. It first flew in 1955, entered service as the MiG-21F-13 around 1960, and became one of the world's most famous jet fighters: the Soviet Union built more than 10,000 before production ended in 1985, more than 50 countries have flown it, and it was built in India under licence and in China as the F-7.[1][2]

Of them, 5,532 were built in one city. Aircraft Plant No. 21 in Gorky (Горький), as Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga was called from 1932 to 1990, produced them from 1959 to 1985, from the first MiG-21F to the last MiG-21bis. The plant, today the Sokol Aircraft Plant (авиазавод «Сокол»), delivered 1,812 of its MiG-21s to 37 countries, built the MiG-21I research aircraft for the Soviet supersonic airliner Tu-144, and in the 1990s developed an upgrade of the fighter for India.[3][4][5]

Design and service

The MiG-21 was the Soviet Union's first truly modern second-generation jet fighter. The Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) developed its "tailed delta" layout, which gave it manoeuvrability, high speed and good medium-altitude performance, and a series of increasingly powerful engines, from the R11F to the R25, came from the bureau of Sergei Tumansky. The first production version, the MiG-21F-13, carried the K-13 infrared-homing air-to-air missile. The MiG-21PF added radar, the MiG-21S more powerful engines and blown flaps, and the fighter grew into a multi-role aircraft; reconnaissance and two-seat trainer versions also flew.[2]

The MiG-21 saw combat almost from the moment it was first exported — in the Middle East in 1967 and 1973, between India and Pakistan in 1971 and over North Vietnam, which had more than 200 of them.[1][2] India became a major user: Hindustan Aeronautics built 657 under licence, and the Indian Air Force decommissioned its last MiG-21s at Chandigarh on 26 September 2025, after 62 years of service.[14][15]

Twenty-six years in Gorky

Aircraft Plant No. 21 named after Sergo Ordzhonikidze had been building Mikoyan fighters — the MiG-15, the MiG-17 and the supersonic MiG-19 — since the early 1950s.[5] A decree of the USSR Council of Ministers of 16 January 1959 ordered it to put the MiG-21F into production even before the prototype's state trials were over; they ended on 21 December 1959. At the plant the new fighter was "type 72".[3] In August of the same year the government closed the whole City of Gorky to foreign visitors. Foreign intelligence officers, the regional newspaper Nizhegorodskaya Pravda later wrote, had tried to gather information about the city's leading defence factories, among them the aircraft plant; the restriction was lifted only on 6 September 1991.[6]

To keep the airfield free of unfinished work, in July 1959 the plant set up a control and test station inside the final assembly shop, where every system of the aircraft was checked on the ground, separately and in combination, before the first flight. In December 1959 the assembly shop handed the first ten MiG-21Fs over to the airfield, and by the end of the year plant pilots had flown seven of them; according to the recollections of the military test pilot Alexei Rogatnev, the first Gorky MiG-21 was taken into the air by the plant's test pilot Pyotr Anufriev. Air Force acceptance pilots began flying the type in February 1960.[3]

Gorky engineers also solved a problem of the new aircraft. The design had no means of adjusting directional trim at supersonic speed, so the plant's flight-test engineers and aerodynamicists of the Mikoyan bureau cut openings in the sides of the rear fuselage fairing and riveted on a small "compensator" strip, left or right, using the effect of the engine exhaust on the fairing. The method was approved by the design bureau. The work on the nose-wheel shimmy damper was led by Rostislav Belyakov, later the bureau's general designer, who often watched take-offs from the edge of the runway to see how the nose gear behaved.[3]

In 1960 Gorky switched to the MiG-21F-13 and in the second half of 1961 to the radar-equipped MiG-21PF, whose first Gorky example was flown by Sergei Savchenkov, a test pilot born in the village of Novaya Sloboda in what is now the Bolshoye Boldino district of the Nizhny Novgorod region.[3][7] For the Aviation Day air parade of 1961 the plant sent 30 MiG-21F-13s and two of the new MiG-21PFs.[3] The improved MiG-21PFM followed, and output peaked: 320 MiG-21PFMs in 1964 and 397 in 1965, which the plant history calls its largest annual output of MiG-21s and links to the war in Vietnam.[3][4]

On 9 October 1964 Major Boris Ryabtsev, a senior test pilot of the military acceptance team, was flying a new production MiG-21 when its engine stuck at about 60 per cent of power and the aircraft began to lose height over the city. Instead of ejecting at once, he steered it away from residential districts and the plant, and ejected so low that his parachute had no time to open. He was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1964, and a street in Nizhny Novgorod, Ryabtseva Street, bears his name.[3][8]

New versions followed one another on the Gorky line: the MiG-21R reconnaissance aircraft (448 built in 1966–1971 for the Air Force and for export), the MiG-21S, MiG-21SM and MiG-21SMT, and from October 1972 the MiG-21bis, the most celebrated version, with the R25-300 engine from Ufa. About 2,000 MiG-21bis were built in Gorky between 1972 and 1985. On 19 February 1974 the plant's test pilot Oleg Sporynin, a native of Gorky, was killed in a MiG-21bis on approach, when smoke from the industrial zone of Dzerzhinsk suddenly drifted across the glide path.[3][4][9]

From the Volga to 37 countries

According to the plant, between 1962 and 1986 it delivered 1,812 MiG-21s of various versions to 37 countries. Besides the members of the Warsaw Pact, its list includes Vietnam, Cuba, Finland, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya, India, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Angola, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, Laos and both Yemens.[5] In 1974 the plant organised production of the MiG-21MF ("type 63") specifically for export, and in 1977, after the Soviet Union had agreed to license MiG-21 production to India, a lead aircraft was assembled to prepare the documentation for Indian production. In 1977–1981 Gorky built up to 220 MiG-21bis a year, most of them for export; the aircraft were dismantled, packed into containers for rail transport or loaded into transport aircraft at the factory airfield.[4]

The plant was watched from abroad. The CIA's index of photographic intelligence products for 1978 lists, among thousands of entries, a report on "Fishbed" shipping crates at the "Gorkiy Airframe Plant 21".[10]

In April 1985 a rally in the assembly shop saw off aircraft No. 75-8124, the last MiG-21 built in Gorky, ending 25 years of production. For ten years the plant had built the MiG-21, MiG-25 and MiG-31 side by side; production of the MiG-21 and the MiG-25 ended in the same year. The plant's production table records 5,532 MiG-21s of all versions.[4]

The Tu-144 "analog"

In 1965–1966 the plant's own design bureau began work on an "analog" aircraft for the Tu-144, the Soviet supersonic airliner then being designed by the Tupolev bureau. Built on the MiG-21, it had no horizontal tail and a new delta wing reproducing the airliner's layout, almost twice the area of the standard MiG-21 wing, so that test pilots could study the take-off, landing and flight behaviour of such a configuration. The design team was led by E. I. Mindrov; the wings were made at the aircraft plant in Voronezh, where the Tu-144 itself was being built, and two flying examples and one for static tests were assembled in Gorky's experimental shop.[4]

The first MiG-21I was flown from the Gorky factory airfield on 18 April 1968 by Oleg Gudkov, a test pilot of the Flight Research Institute (LII) at Zhukovsky. At the institute the aircraft was used to measure stability and control and to prepare the crew for the first flight of the Tu-144; among those who flew it were Eduard Elyan, M. Kozlov and Igor Volk. The Tu-144 made its first flight on 31 December 1968, two months before the Anglo-French Concorde.[4][11] The second MiG-21I, No. 01-0103, was flown at Gorky and ferried to the institute by Igor Volk in February 1970. The first aircraft was lost in July 1970, killing its pilot, V. S. Konstantinov; the second is displayed beside a Tu-144 at the Central Air Force Museum at Monino near Moscow.[4]

After production: the MiG-21-93

In 1993–1995 the plant, by then the Nizhny Novgorod Aircraft Plant Sokol, joined the Mikoyan bureau, the radar maker Fazotron and the State Research Institute of Aviation Systems in a programme to modernise the MiG-21bis. The MiG-21-93 received almost completely new avionics and weapons, including the Kopyo radar, and first flew from the Nizhny Novgorod factory airfield on 25 May 1995 with the Mikoyan test pilot V. M. Gorbunov, a Hero of Russia, at the controls. In 1996 the plant signed a contract with the government of India to upgrade 125 MiG-21bis, and it reported the contract fulfilled at the end of 2005.[5] The upgraded Indian version, the MiG-21UPG, was created at the plant in 1995–2000 under the technical direction of the Mikoyan bureau.[4]

Memory

In Chkalovsk, the Volga town where the test pilot Valery Chkalov was born, a MiG-21PFM stands on a pedestal beside the Chkalov House of Culture; it was unveiled in 1984 for the 80th anniversary of Chkalov's birth.[12] A MiG-21 is also among the aircraft of the Sokol plant's history museum, founded in 1966 on the plant's territory and open to organised groups.[13] The second MiG-21I analog, assembled and first flown in Gorky, is preserved at Monino.[4]

See also

Sources

  1. National Museum of the United States Air Force — fact sheet "Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21PF 'Fishbed-D'" (archive)
  2. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — collection object "Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21F-13 FISHBED-C", inventory A19930354000 (archive)
  3. testpilot.ru — Ya. A. Isaenko, N. D. Levadny, A. M. Elkinbard, Lyotchiki, ispytaniya, samolyoty ("Pilots, tests, aircraft"), history of the flight-test department of the Sokol plant, Nizhny Novgorod: NAZ Sokol, 2013; chapter "The sixties: the MiG-21" (in Russian) (archive)
  4. testpilot.ru — the same book, chapter "The seventies and eighties: the MiG-21 — improvement, end of production", pp. 139–168, including the plant's production table for 1959–1994 (in Russian) (archive)
  5. Nizhny Novgorod Aircraft Plant Sokol — "History", official website of the plant, archived copy of 26 December 2014 (in Russian)
  6. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — "Our city was long closed to foreigners: the special status was lifted 30 years ago", 9 September 2021 (in Russian) (archive)
  7. testpilot.ru — biography of Sergei Ivanovich Savchenkov (in Russian) (archive)
  8. testpilot.ru — biography of Boris Ivanovich Ryabtsev (in Russian) (archive)
  9. testpilot.ru — biography of Oleg Yevgenyevich Sporynin (in Russian)
  10. Central Intelligence Agency — "Annual Index to Photographic Exploitation Products, January–December 1978", vol. 2 of 4, CIA-RDP79T01184A000100020001-7 (released) (archive)
  11. Kazan National Research Technical University (KAI) — Tu-144 museum project, "History of a legend" (archive)
  12. Vremya N — "Chkalovsk: history and the present day" (in Russian) (archive)
  13. transport-nn.ru — "Museum of the Nizhny Novgorod aircraft plant", 4 August 2022 (in Russian) (archive)
  14. The Tribune (India) — "IAF chief flies MiG-21 amid final farewell; legacy of 6 decades ends Sept 26", August 2025 (archive)
  15. The Morung Express — IANS, "Sun sets on India's iconic MiG-21 fighter jets after 62 years of service", Chandigarh, 26 September 2025