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.

None of those Russian flights exist any more. But for about fifteen years 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, with the prices exactly as they were advertised at the time.

2005: A Menu of Soviet Fighters

The 2005 site had a page called “Angebote”, offers, and it is a time capsule. Thirty minutes in an L-29 started at $599 and in an L-39 at $949. Then came the fighters: a MiG-21 from $3,499, a MiG-23 from $3,999, a MiG-29 from $6,999, a Su-27 for $8,499 and, at the top, a MiG-25 for $9,499. (The MiG-29’s own page listed it at $6,499, so the site was not entirely consistent with itself.) Every price 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.

Then there were the packages. A MiG-21 flight from Zhukovsky airbase with three nights at the Hotel Cosmos cost $4,199. The top package, an “Edge of Space” flight in the MiG-25 with four hotel nights, a visit to the Monino air force museum and professional photos, ran from $10,649 at the Hotel Budapest to $11,999 at the Kempinski Baltschug, across the river from the Kremlin.

2006 to 2009: From Zhukovsky to Sokol, and the MiG-31

The MiG-25 flights did not last. According to MiGFlug’s own 2008 website, the Gromov Flight Research Institute at Zhukovsky near Moscow flew its last MiG-25 passenger flights in January 2006. The same page says MiGFlug became the first Western operator to fly customers from the Sokol airfield at Nizhny Novgorod, the plant where the MiG-31 is built, in August 2006.

By November 2008 the star of the Russian programme was the MiG-31E Foxhound, at EUR 19,999. 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 airport train to Domodedovo and an S7 Airlines Boeing 737 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 with Thunder City in Cape Town, in the BAe Buccaneer, the Hawker Hunter and the English Electric Lightning. The Lightning cost EUR 12,499 for 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. That chapter has a sad footnote: on 14 November 2009, Thunder City pilot Dave Stock was killed when his Lightning crashed during an air show display at Overberg.

2011 to 2019: 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: EUR 10,800 for 25 minutes, EUR 14,800 for 45 minutes including supersonic flight, and EUR 19,900 for a flight to the edge of space at around 21 kilometres.

The Edge of Space flight became MiGFlug’s signature product. By 2019 the page promised 20 to 22 kilometres depending on weather and temperature, with at least 17 kilometres guaranteed, for EUR 17,500. Customers came back with cockpit video of a black sky and a curved horizon, and some of those videos are still among the most watched things we have ever published.

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.

How It Ended, and What Is Left

By November 2019 the MiG-29 page still listed its prices, EUR 12,500 for 25 minutes and EUR 14,500 for 45 minutes with supersonic flight, but under them sat a new line: “Sorry, currently not available.” MiGFlug no longer offers any flights in Russia. The MiG-25, MiG-31, Su-27 and MiG-29 flights, and the Lightning in Cape Town, are now history.

One supersonic option survives. 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 costs $35,000 today, ten times the $3,499 a MiG-21 flight cost on our 2005 menu, and it comes in exactly the same turquoise cockpit.

Sources: Internet Archive Wayback Machine snapshots of migflug.com from February 2005, November 2008, January 2009, July 2011, January 2019 and November 2019; MiGFlug, MiG-21 supersonic flight page; defenceWeb, “Thunder City pilot dies in Lightning crash” (November 2009). Prices are quoted as advertised at the time.