The fact that the US Air Force operated a number of original Russian MiGs in Tonopah, New Mexico from the late 1970s until shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall under the designation “Constant Peg” in the secret aggressor squadron 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron “Red Eagles” has probably been known to interested parties at least since Steve Davies’ book of the same name. book of the same name from 2008. Now, however, the military journalist has brought two former “Red Eagles” pilots into a video conference on his blog “10 Percent True” (see YouTube video below) and shown a lot of rare footage. In a second video, Ted “Gabby” Drake and Rob “Z Man” Zettle answer questions from the community at length (video at the bottom). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BayjAFra_6U&feature=emb_logo
The two veterans were once pilots of that special unit, which usually had a complement of 16 aircraft. In MiG-17F, MiG-21F-13, Shenyang F-7B and MiG-23MF/-MS and -BN (fighter-bomber version with “duck nose”), they flew more than 15,000 aggressor and familiarization missions against USAF, Navy and Marine Corps pilots in and out of the Tonopah Test Range (TTR) over the years. “Z Man” Zettle recalls, “Every time I got in that damn MiG-23, it wanted to kill me.” In fact, at 100 accidents per 100,000 flight hours, the rate for the type was far higher than usual in the USAF, with two pilots dying in their MiGs. However, only one of these was made public, and the family of Captain Mark Postai only found out why and in which aircraft he died in 2007. It was not until mid-November 2006 that the secrecy surrounding “Constant Peg” was officially lifted, with a separate ceremony involving former 4477 commanders Mike Scott, Earl Henderson and Gail Peck, as well as the USAF Test and Evaluation Director John T. Manclark, who was in charge at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t72vCSEMOUg&feature=emb_logo The MiGs came from defectors – for example to Israel – or swaps following changes in political alignment in Indonesia or Egypt. The MiG-17F, already obsolete since Vietnam and the Middle East wars, was retired from the 4477th TES in 1981, but towards the end of the program ten MiG-21s and F-7Bs and four different MiG-23s had “come together”. A few of these aircraft are still preserved, for example as part of the display collection of captured or traded-in foreign aircraft at Nellis AFB. This MiG-23S on the other hand, was overhauled around 2017 and integrated into the USAF Museum in Dayton/Ohio.
The “Red Eagles” were disbanded in 1988/89, but something similar is still going on in the southwest of the USA. US pilots are now flying early Su-27s and MiG-29s – presumably from the mysterious Groom Lake flight test center – from similar sources as before, but these are now located in the Ukraine, for example (see report) and in Moldova. Even some of the first F-117A stealth fighters, which were actually decommissioned in 2008, are not quite as parked there as was usually assumed and can even be found unmarked (see here). But all of this is of course still classified.
