It is Thursday, so we did something we rarely do: we went back through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and read our own old websites. The oldest copy of migflug.com it holds dates from February 2005. Its page title was “MiG Flights in Moscow and Russia”, it was written in German, and its aircraft list reads like a Cold War order of battle: L-29, L-39, MiG-21, MiG-23, MiG-25, MiG-29 Und Su-27.

Those Russian flights are history now. But for well over a decade they were the heart of MiGFlug, and they produced some of the most extraordinary days any of our customers ever had. Here is what the archive shows: the jets, the flights we offered, and how the website itself changed along the way.

2005: A Menu of Soviet Fighters

The 2005 site had a page called “Angebote”, offers, and it is a time capsule. The menu started with 30-minute flights in the L-29 and L-39 jet trainers. Then came the fighters: the MiG-21, the MiG-23, the MiG-29, the Su-27 and, at the very top of the list, the MiG-25. Every flight included a translator and the transfer to the airbase, and take-off and landing time was not counted.

The flight descriptions are pure 2005 enthusiasm. The MiG-25 page promised supersonic flight up to Mach 2.8 and a climb to 24 kilometres in two minutes. The Su-27 page listed Pugachev’s Cobra and the tail slide in its flight programme, and so did the MiG-29’s. Those were the website’s claims, not measured figures, but they tell you what customers were being offered: the real aircraft, flown the way their test pilots showed them off at air shows.

The MiG-25 Foxbat, the top of MiGFlug’s 2005 menu. Photo: US Department of Defense

By November 2008 the star of the Russian programme was the MiG-31E Foxhound. The page described a 25 to 30-minute flight to roughly 22 to 23 kilometres, depending on weather and season, at up to Mach 2.35, with the chance to take the controls. It was honest about the jet’s limits, too: the Foxhound, it noted, was far less suited to aerobatics than the MiG-29.

The day itself was an expedition. A translator collected you from your Moscow hotel early in the morning, you took the train to the airport and a short domestic flight to Nizhny Novgorod, and a driver took you to the base. After a document check and a medical with the base doctor, a test pilot walked you through four possible flight programmes. Afterwards came lunch in the base canteen, a certificate and an evening flight back to Moscow.

For a while there was a western alternative as well. In 2008 MiGFlug also sold flights in South Africa in the BAe Buccaneer, the Hawker Hunter and the English Electric Lightning. The Lightning flight lasted 35 to 40 minutes, reached about Mach 1.4 on customer flights and climbed to nearly 22 kilometres, and, as the 2008 page pointed out, it seated the passenger beside the pilot rather than behind.

2011 to 2017: The MiG-29 Years

By 2011 the MiG-29UB two-seater had taken over from the Foxhound. In July 2011, the MiGFlug site described Sokol as the only place in the world where civilians could legally fly a MiG-29, with three options: a 25-minute flight, a 45-minute flight including supersonic flight, and a flight to the edge of space at around 21 kilometres.

The Edge of Space flight became MiGFlug’s signature product. By 2016 the climb took customers to 20 to 22 kilometres, high enough to see a black sky and the curvature of the Earth. They came back with cockpit video that is still among the most watched things we have ever published.

The MiG-29 flights ended in 2017. For a while afterwards the product pages stayed online, with a new line underneath: “Sorry, currently not available. Contact us to get on waiting list.”

How migflug.com Changed Along the Way

Reading the old sites back to back is also a short history of the web. The 2005 site was built the way many small sites were then, out of HTML frames, with a separate navigation bar and header loaded into one window, a German section and an English section in separate folders, a photo gallery, a downloads page and a page listing the Moscow hotels you could book with your flight.

By 2008 MiGFlug had a proper content-managed site in German, English and Spanish, with a menu that tells you how much the business had grown: flights in Russia, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Germany, the USA and South Africa, zero-gravity flights, incentives, “special services”, a visit to the Monino museum and, a sign of the times, “climate-neutral flights”.

Der 2011 site moved to English-first addresses such as “/en/jet-fighter-flights/”, gave the company address as a village on Lake Lucerne, and linked to Twitter, Facebook and an RSS feed.

Der 2017 homepage greeted German visitors with “Sie können einen echten Kampfjet fliegen”, you can fly a real fighter jet, under a big MiG-29 banner. It invited them to take a tour, listed some 19 flight programmes from the MiG-29 Edge of Space to L-39 flights in Florida, New York, California, Paris, Riga and San Marino, and showed a row of social icons that now looks like a museum in itself: Google Plus, Flickr, Tumblr and Pinterest next to YouTube and Instagram. The company had moved to Zurich by then.

From around 2018 the site took on today’s structure, with every flight living under “/flights-prices/”. In 2019 the homepage still opened with a MiG-29 coming straight at the camera and the line “Fly a Real Fighter Jet.” The blog became Afterburner, MiGFlug’s magazine, and moved to its own address in 2026.

The MiG-29: We Hope It Comes Back

Of all the jets on those old pages, the one customers still ask about most is the MiG-29. We have not given up on it. We hope to fly the Fulcrum again one day, and we have seen some encouraging signals. When there is something concrete to announce, you will read it here first.

Today: The MiG-21, Still Supersonic

One supersonic jet survives from that 2005 menu, and you can still fly it. The MiG-21 supersonic flight in Florida is a 40-minute flight over the Gulf of Mexico, where the jet can break the sound barrier over international waters. It includes aerobatics, a turn at the controls, ground school, all equipment and a supersonic certificate. On our MiG-21 page we put it simply: Concorde stopped flying in 2003, our MiG-29 flights in 2017, and since then this is likely the last chance to join the supersonic club.

The MiG-21 is the right jet to carry the torch. It first flew in the mid-1950s, more than 11,000 were built, making it the most-produced supersonic jet in history, and it served with around 60 air forces. Today it is also one of the very few ways left for a civilian to go supersonic at all. Find out more and book the MiG-21 flight here.

The Question Everybody Asked

Across all those years and all those jets, one question came up on almost every Russian trip: why is the cockpit that colour? The answer turned out to depend on the aircraft. The MiG-25 and MiG-31 were classic Soviet turquoise, the MiG-29 was grey, and the Su-27 was Sukhoi’s own blue-grey. We have finally written it all down in Chirurgisches Grün bei Mach 2: Das Cockpit-Rätsel der MiG-21.

Sources: Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshots of migflug.com from February 2005, November 2008, January 2009, July 2011, January 2017, January 2019 and November 2019; MiGFlug, MiG-21 supersonic flight page; MiGFlug Edge of Space flight infographic (2016).