More MiG-23s were built than any other variable-sweep aircraft in history. Over five thousand of them, across sixty air forces, from East Germany to North Korea. It was the Soviet Union’s first fighter with look-down radar and one of its first with a real beyond-visual-range missile.

American pilots who flew it in secret over Nevada came away with a very specific opinion. It would out-accelerate anything they had. And they were frightened of it.

The Wing Was the Point

The Soviet Air Force wanted a fighter that could take off from short, rough strips, dash at Mach 2, and land slowly enough not to kill its pilots. Those requirements pull in opposite directions. A wing good for landing is bad for Mach 2, and vice versa.

The answer was a wing that changed shape. Sixteen degrees for takeoff and landing, forty-five for cruise, seventy-two for the dash. Mikoyan also tried the other approach — the 23-01 with dedicated lift jets flew in April 1967 and was abandoned, because lift engines are dead weight for the ninety-nine per cent of the flight when they are switched off.

The Flogger also brought the Soviet Union its first look-down, shoot-down radar in the Sapfir family, and the R-23 missile to go with it. Before this, a Soviet interceptor largely could not see a target below it against ground clutter. After it, NATO’s low-level penetration tactics stopped being a free pass.

The Americans Who Flew It in Secret

Between 1977 and 1988, the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron — the Red Eagles — flew captured and acquired Soviet aircraft against American crews over Nevada under the programme name Constant Peg. They had MiG-17s, MiG-21s and MiG-23s.

The MiG-23 was the one nobody wanted.

Their reasons were concrete. The aircraft became unstable approaching high angle of attack and would depart controlled flight. There was a device on the control column that physically rapped the pilot’s knuckles as he neared the limit. The Red Eagles nicknamed it the Looping Hog.

And yet.

That is the MiG-23 in two quotes. Terrifying to fly, and faster off the mark than an F-15. Soviet design philosophy in a sentence: build the machine around one overwhelming advantage and accept the cost everywhere else.

The Ledger Nobody Agrees On

The Flogger fought almost everywhere, and almost every claim about it is disputed.

Over Lebanon in 1982, Russian historian Vladimir Ilyin records Syria losing six MiG-23MF, four MiG-23MS and fourteen MiG-23BN in June alone. Israel confirms losing a target drone to a Syrian MiG-23MF and little else. Western and Russian accounts of that campaign diverge so completely that Wikipedia opens its own combat section with a warning.

The Iran–Iraq War is better documented. An Iraqi MiG-23MS downed an Iranian F-5E on 23 September 1980 — the type’s first air-to-air kill. An Iraqi MiG-23ML killed an Iranian F-14 with an R-60MK in August 1984, and another in September 1986. On 20 February 1986 an Iraqi MiG-23ML shot down a Fokker F27 airliner, killing all fifty-one people aboard. Iraq’s own post-war documents admit forty-three MiG-23s lost, and those figures are demonstrably understated.

The One That Flew Itself to Belgium

On 4 July 1989, Colonel Nikolai Skuridin ejected from a MiG-23M near Kołobrzeg in Poland after his afterburner failed at about 150 metres.

The engine then recovered. The aircraft, on autopilot and with nobody in it, flew roughly 900 kilometres across East Germany, West Germany and the Netherlands. American F-15s from Soesterberg intercepted it and confirmed the cockpit was empty. A Phantom scrambled from RAF Wattisham. Nobody shot it down over populated Europe.

It ran out of fuel and crashed into a house at Bellegem, near Kortrijk in Belgium, killing an eighteen-year-old student named Wim Delaere. The Soviet Union paid Belgium $685,000.

Russia retired its last MiG-23s by 1998. The type still flies with North Korea, Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, Libya and Sudan — a handful of airframes apiece, more than half a century after Fedotov first swept the wings back over Zhukovsky. Syria, contrary to a widespread assumption, no longer operates them; the aircraft insurgents found at Aleppo in 2024 were derelict.

Sources: Peter Grier, “Constant Peg”, Air Force Magazine, April 2007; Hush-Kit interview with Lt. Col. Rob Zettel, 29 December 2025; Vladimir Ilyin via published Russian accounts; ACIG Iran–Iraq War records; Hoyle, World Air Forces; IISS Military Balance.