Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25
“Foxbat”
The fastest interceptor ever mass-produced — a stainless-steel monster built to catch aircraft at the edge of space, and the jet whose myth terrified the West until a defector landed one in Japan.
Built to catch the uncatchable
In the late 1950s, Soviet air-defence planners faced a nightmare menu of American high-altitude, high-speed threats — the U-2 spyplane, the Mach-2 B-58 Hustler, and above all the Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie bomber then in development. No Soviet interceptor could reach that flight envelope. In 1958 the PVO issued a requirement for a manned interceptor able to reach roughly 3,000 km/h at nearly 27,000 metres, and the Mikoyan-Gurevich bureau began work on the aircraft that became the MiG-25.
The result, first flown in 1964 and in service by 1970, was unlike anything in the West: a huge twin-tailed machine built around two enormous turbojets, welded largely from nickel-steel rather than titanium, and optimised for one thing above all — straight-line speed and altitude. When it broke cover through a 1967 flypast and a string of world records, Western analysts saw the colossal wing and blistering numbers and concluded the USSR had fielded a super-agile Mach-3 fighter. That fear helped launch the F-15 Eagle.
They were wrong. The MiG-25 was a specialised high-speed interceptor and reconnaissance platform — heavy, thirsty and structurally limited in a turn, never meant to dogfight. The truth was only fully exposed on 6 September 1976, when Lieutenant Viktor Belenko defected to Japan with an intact example and Western engineers finally took the myth apart. It remains, even so, the fastest and among the highest-flying combat aircraft ever mass-produced — beaten only by the SR-71.
And for a brief, remarkable window, you could ride one yourself: from 2004 to 2006, MiGFlug flew civilian passengers to the edge of space in a MiG-25 — the only way an ordinary person ever got to experience the Foxbat’s Mach-speed climb to the stratosphere.
01The MiG-25’s great deception: how record flights fooled NATO into building the F-15
From 1965 the Soviets set a run of world speed and altitude records with the type, flown under the cover designation “Ye-266.” To Western eyes the numbers were terrifying: a machine that could apparently sprint past Mach 3 and climb near the edge of space. Combined with its enormous wing — which analysts read as a sign of tight-turning agility — the intelligence community concluded the USSR had built a Mach-3 air-superiority fighter that would outclass anything America flew.
That assessment shaped a generation of US procurement, feeding directly into the requirement for the F-15 Eagle. The reality — a heavy, steel, straight-line interceptor with a big wing needed simply to carry it at altitude, not to turn — only became undeniable when Belenko’s aircraft was dismantled in 1976. The Foxbat is perhaps the Cold War’s greatest case of an adversary being frightened by a machine that was never what it seemed.
What makes it special
A fighter built mostly of steel
About 80% of the MiG-25’s weight is nickel-steel alloy, with only ~9% titanium and ~11% aluminium. Titanium would have been lighter and better in the heat of Mach-2.8 flight, but the Soviets couldn’t reliably weld it and it was ruinously costly. Steel was heavy but cheap, weldable, and could take the kinetic heating — skin temperatures climb past 300 °C — of sustained supersonic flight.
Two giant turbojets — and the Mach 3.2 legend
Power came from two Tumansky R-15B-300 afterburning turbojets, about 100 kN each in reheat — roughly 200 kN combined. The airframe could touch Mach 3.2 in a dash, but doing so destroyed the engines: above about Mach 2.83 the compressors ran away. Pilots were red-lined at Mach 2.83, and even then only for minutes before the airframe overheated.
The ‘Fox Fire’ burn-through radar
The interceptor’s RP-25 Smerch-A radar (NATO “Fox Fire”) was a brute — a vacuum-tube set commonly cited at around 600 kW, designed to overpower enemy jamming by sheer output. Its weakness, exposed in 1976, was that it couldn’t look down and shoot down low-flying targets — a gap closed only in the later MiG-25PD and the MiG-31.
02The MiG-25’s steel airframe: why the Soviets skipped titanium
The SR-71 solved the heat problem of sustained supersonic flight with titanium. The Soviets could not: welding titanium reliably was beyond their production base in the 1960s, and the metal was extraordinarily expensive. So Mikoyan-Gurevich built the Foxbat overwhelmingly from a nickel-steel alloy — roughly 80% of its weight — assembled largely by welding, some of it by hand. When Western engineers took Belenko’s jet apart in 1976 they reportedly found rust bleeding through the paint. Steel made the aircraft heavy and thirsty, but it was cheap, robust and could survive the ~300 °C skin temperatures of Mach 2.8 flight.
03The MiG-25’s engines: the Mach 3.2 dash that wrecked them
The most famous demonstration of the Foxbat’s speed — and its limits — came over the Sinai in 1971, when a Soviet-crewed reconnaissance MiG-25 accelerated to Mach 3.2 to outrun an intercepting Israeli F-4 Phantom and its missiles. It escaped clean, but the over-revved engines were ruined and had to be scrapped. That was the deal the airframe offered: it could exceed Mach 3, but only by sacrificing its engines. In everyday service the type was firmly limited to Mach 2.83.
Full specifications
Baseline note: the figures below describe the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25PD and the MiG-25PDS (izdeliye 84D, NATO Foxbat-E) — the definitive single-seat interceptor, with the Sapfir-25 (RP-25M) pulse-Doppler radar, an under-nose infra-red search and track head, and two Tumansky R-15BD-300 afterburning turbojets. That is the right baseline because it is the mark the Soviet Union was forced to build: the PD was rushed into production in 1978 and 459 existing MiG-25P airframes were rebuilt to PDS standard from 1979, precisely because Viktor Belenko had handed the West the earlier aeroplane two years before. Deltas for the original MiG-25P (Foxbat-A, Smerch-A radar, R-15B-300 engines), the MiG-25R/RB reconnaissance-bomber family (Foxbat-B/D), the MiG-25BM defence-suppression aircraft and the MiG-25PU and MiG-25RU trainers are in grey. Six cautions before any number here is quoted. First, this aeroplane is the most mythologised jet of the Cold War and a great deal of what circulates about it was written before September 1976, when nobody in the West had seen one. Second, the airframe is not titanium: it is roughly 80 per cent nickel-steel alloy, 11 per cent aluminium and 8 per cent titanium, and the choice was driven by heat and by manufacturing, not by poverty — thin-walled welded titanium structures kept cracking, and arc-welded steel did not. Airvectors and most Russian accounts give 8 per cent titanium; the English Wikipedia table prints 9 per cent, which is the only reading that makes the three figures sum to 100. Third, the afterburning rating of the engine is genuinely disputed: Western tables almost all print 100.1 kN (10,210 kgf) while Russian sources for the same engine family print 11,200 kgf (109.8 kN), and the two are quoted below side by side rather than averaged. Fourth, Mach 3.2 is not a performance figure, it is an accident report — the one recorded excursion to that speed, over Sinai in 1971, destroyed both engines, and the type’s operational limit was Mach 2.83, with Belenko telling his debriefers that the red line in his own squadron was lower still. Fifth, production totals differ by source: 1,186 airframes is the usual English figure and Russian Wikipedia gives 1,119, with the Gorky plant building from the mid-1960s to 1984 or 1985 depending on which final delivery is counted. Sixth, the reconnaissance airframes are not the same aeroplane in the wing: the recce wing is commonly given as 13.42 m (44 ft 0 in) in span with a constant leading-edge sweep, against the interceptor’s 14.02 m (46 ft 0 in) compound-swept wing, so interceptor and reconnaissance tables must never be mixed. Figures checked against English and Russian Wikipedia, airvectors.net and FAI record listings on 3 September 2026.
Dimensions & weights
- Crew
- 1 — one pilot, flying an aeroplane deliberately designed so that he did as little as possible. The MiG-25 was an element of a ground-controlled interception system: the Vozdukh-1M command network flew the aircraft to the merge through the Lazur-M datalink, and on the automatic mode the pilot could be a passenger until missile release. The MiG-25PU and MiG-25RU trainers added a second, separate cockpit stepped down ahead of the standard one, with no radar and no weapon channel in either; there was never a combat-capable two-seat MiG-25, which is one of the differences that matters when this type is confused with the two-crew MiG-31
- Length overall
- 23.82 m (78 ft 2 in), the figure given for the interceptor including the long nose air-data boom. Shorter numbers in circulation exclude the boom or measure the fuselage alone; they are a different convention, not a different aeroplane, and the two must not be mixed within one table
- Wingspan
- 14.02 m (46 ft 0 in) on the interceptor, whose wing carries a compound leading edge with a small outboard extension. The MiG-25R and MiG-25RB reconnaissance airframes use a wing of reduced span, commonly given as 13.42 m (44 ft 0 in), with a constant leading-edge sweep — a real structural difference and the single most common source of contradictory MiG-25 tables
- Height
- 6.10 m (20 ft 0 in) over the twin fins. The fins are enormous by the standards of any other fighter of the period because a 36-tonne aeroplane at Mach 2.8 needs directional stability that a single fin of sane size cannot provide
- Wing area
- 61.4 m² (661 sq ft). This is a very large wing for a fighter, and it is the reason Western analysts in 1967 read the aircraft as a manoeuvring air-superiority fighter. It is not: the area is there to make the aircraft flyable at 20,000 m, where the air will barely hold it up, and it buys nothing at all in a turning fight lower down
- Wing sweep
- About 41° at the leading edge on the interceptor’s outer panels, with a sharper inboard glove blended into the vast rectangular intake trunks. The intakes are structural: they carry a large share of the load and give the aeroplane its characteristic slab-sided planform
- Empty weight
- 20,000 kg (44,092 lb). A MiG-25 empty weighs roughly three times an empty MiG-21. Steel is heavy, and the weight is the price paid for an airframe that can sit in Mach 2.8 kinetic heating for minutes at a time without annealing
- Normal take-off weight
- 36,720 kg (80,954 lb) with full internal fuel and four R-40 rounds. English tables often print this same number as "gross weight"; it is the standard intercept configuration and not a maximum
- Maximum take-off weight
- 41,200 kg (90,830 lb) with the 5,300-litre belly tank fitted. Sources disagree here more than anywhere else in the aircraft’s data, because some tables never count the ventral tank at all and stop at 36,720 kg. Both numbers are correct for different aeroplanes on different days
- Internal fuel
- 17,660 litres (4,666 US gal), about 14,570 kg (32,120 lb), in welded steel fuselage and wing tanks that are part of the primary structure. The fuel is also the hydraulic working fluid and the heat sink for the airframe and avionics — an elegant answer to Mach 2.8 skin temperatures and a very poor one to a fuel leak
- External fuel
- 1 × 5,300 litres (1,400 US gal) in the large spindle-shaped ventral tank cleared on the MiG-25PD and on the reconnaissance-bombers. It is a ferry and transit store; it is jettisoned before any supersonic dash and it is not compatible with the fuselage bomb racks
- Maximum ordnance
- ~5,000 kg (11,020 lb) of FAB-500M-62T bombs on the late MiG-25RB, carried on tandem triple ejector racks under the fuselage plus a pylon under each wing; early MiG-25RBs carried four rounds, about 2,000 kg (4,410 lb). The interceptor carries no ordnance at all beyond its four missile pylons — no bomb rack, no gun, no rocket pod, ever
Performance
- Maximum speed, high altitude
- 3,000 km/h at 13,000 m (1,864 mph, 1,620 kn at 42,650 ft), which is Mach 2.83. This is not a cruise: it is a straight-line dash, flown on a profile set by ground control, that consumes the aircraft’s fuel in minutes and its engines in hundreds of hours
- Operational Mach limit
- Mach 2.83 — a hard limit, not a caution. Above it the R-15 compressors over-speed and the turbine over-temperatures, and the engines can be damaged beyond repair in a single excursion. Belenko told his American debriefers that the practical red line in his own regiment was lower again, around Mach 2.5, which is the figure most squadrons actually flew to
- The Mach 3.2 dash
- Once, over Sinai, in 1971 — and it wrecked the aeroplane’s engines. A Soviet-crewed MiG-25RB of the 63rd Independent Air Detachment was tracked by Israeli radar at Mach 3.2; the engines over-sped and were scrapped afterwards. Every "Mach 3 fighter" claim made for the MiG-25 traces back to this flight and to the 1965 and 1967 record runs, and none of them describes anything the type could do twice
- Maximum speed, sea level
- 1,200 km/h (746 mph), roughly Mach 0.98. Some tables print 1,300 km/h (808 mph). Either way the MiG-25 is a poor aeroplane at low level: the airframe was never stressed for sustained high-q flight down low, which is exactly the deficiency the MiG-31 was built to fix
- Service ceiling
- 20,700 m (67,900 ft) with four R-40 missiles aboard; about 24,000 m (78,700 ft) with two. The load-out changes the ceiling by more than three kilometres, which tells you how marginal the aerodynamics are at the top of the envelope
- Zoom and record altitude
- 37,650 m (123,520 ft) — the absolute altitude record for an air-breathing aeroplane taking off under its own power, set by Alexander Fedotov in the Ye-266M (MiG-25M, uprated R-15BF2-300 engines) on 31 August 1977. It has never been beaten and, with no manned high-altitude programme of that kind anywhere, it is unlikely to be. This is a ballistic zoom out of the top of the usable envelope, not a place the aircraft could fly
- Rate of climb
- 208 m/s (40,950 ft/min) initial. The type also held time-to-height records: as "Ye-266" it reached 35,000 m in 4 min 11 s in 1973, and Fedotov took it to 29,977 m (98,350 ft) with a 1,000 kg payload on 5 October 1967 in the same series of flights that produced a 2,981.5 km/h (1,853 mph) mark over a 500 km closed circuit
- Range, subsonic
- 1,730 km (1,075 mi) on internal fuel at about Mach 0.9; English Wikipedia gives 1,860 km (1,156 mi) for the same condition. Nearly 18 tonnes of fuel buys an aeroplane with the radius of a short-legged tactical fighter, which is what happens when two engines of this size are asked to push a 36-tonne steel airframe
- Range, supersonic
- 1,250 km (777 mi); English Wikipedia gives 1,630 km (1,013 mi) at Mach 2.35. The spread between sources is wide because the answer depends entirely on how much of the sortie is spent in afterburner, and on a MiG-25 that is nearly all of it
- Ferry range
- 2,575 km (1,600 mi) subsonic with the 5,300-litre ventral tank. There was no production in-flight refuelling capability; a single MiG-25PDZ was converted as a refuelling test aircraft and went no further
- Combat radius
- ~300 km (186 mi) on a supersonic intercept profile. This is the number that defines the aircraft: the MiG-25 was a point-defence interceptor tied to a specific piece of Soviet sky and to the radar station that told it where to go
- Load factor
- +4.5 g clean — and only about 2.2 g with full tanks, one of the most restrictive limits ever placed on a fighter. One airframe survived an inadvertent 11.5 g pull during training and was written off with unrepairable structural damage. The MiG-25 does not turn; it accelerates, climbs, shoots and goes home
- Take-off run
- 1,250 m (4,100 ft) at normal take-off weight, with twin brake parachutes for the landing roll. It needs a long, good, permanent runway, which suited the PVO’s fixed regiment airfields and made the aircraft useless to anyone with a dispersal doctrine
Propulsion & systems
- Engines
- 2 × Tumansky R-15BD-300 afterburning turbojets on the MiG-25PD and PDS. The MiG-25P and the early reconnaissance aircraft used the R-15B-300; the BD is the same thrust class with a redesigned accessory gearbox, better turbine cooling and a much longer life. The lineage is not a fighter engine at all — the R-15 began as the powerplant for the Tu-121 and Tu-123 cruise-missile and drone programmes, which is why it tolerates being run at maximum for its whole working life and why it lasts so briefly
- Thrust, dry
- 73.5 kN each (7,500 kgf, 16,520 lbf). Dry thrust is close to irrelevant on this aeroplane: a MiG-25 doing its job is in afterburner from shortly after brake release
- Thrust, afterburning
- 100.1 kN each (10,210 kgf, 22,500 lbf) in the figure printed by nearly every Western reference. Russian sources for the R-15 family give 11,200 kgf (109.8 kN, 24,690 lbf) instead, and the gap of almost a tonne of thrust per engine has never been reconciled in open literature. The uprated R-15BF2-300 of the record-setting Ye-266M was rated at 98.04 kN dry and 129.7 kN (13,230 kgf) in reheat, and never entered production
- Engine life
- Originally on the order of 150 flying hours between overhauls on the R-15B-300, extended towards 1,000 hours on the R-15BD-300. A Western fighter engine of the period was expected to last several times that. The Soviets accepted it because the alternative was no Mach 2.8 interceptor at all, and because an aircraft that is expected to fight a nuclear war does not need a long overhaul interval
- Fuel system
- Fuel as structure, hydraulic fluid and coolant — the welded steel tanks are load-bearing, the fuel drives part of the hydraulics, and it absorbs the heat soaking into the airframe and the avionics at Mach 2.8. Water-methanol injection was fitted to boost thrust. Elegant, cheap and unforgiving: there is very little redundancy in it
- Airframe materials
- About 80 per cent nickel-steel alloy, 11 per cent aluminium, 8 per cent titanium — sources give 8 or 9 per cent for the titanium. Steel was chosen because welded thin-wall titanium structures kept cracking and the problem could not be solved in time, not because the Soviet Union could not afford titanium; it was building titanium submarine hulls in the same decade. Construction used spot welding, machine welding and a great deal of hand arc welding, with non-flush rivets left proud in areas that did not matter aerodynamically
- Radar
- Sapfir-25 (RP-25M) on the MiG-25PD/PDS: a semiconductor set with 100–120 km detection range and, crucially, genuine look-down and shoot-down capability against a target below the horizon. The MiG-25P carried the Smerch-A (RP-25), a vacuum-tube set of roughly 600 kW peak power with detection to about 100 km (62 miles) and tracking to 50 km (31 miles), and no look-down capability whatever. Replacing it was the whole point of the PD programme
- Infra-red search and track
- TP-26Sh1 under the nose on the MiG-25PD and PDS, giving a passive engagement channel for the R-40T and R-60 rounds. The undernose IRST blister is the quickest external way to tell a PD or PDS from a MiG-25P
- Ground-control link
- Lazur-M datalink to the Vozdukh-1M network — the aeroplane was one node in a system, and outside that system it was close to useless. Iraqi and Syrian MiG-25s flying without a competent ground picture were markedly less dangerous than the same aircraft over Soviet territory, which is a large part of the type’s poor combat record against Western fighters
- Electronics technology
- Vacuum tubes and nuvistors, deliberately — the finding from the 1976 teardown that most embarrassed and most impressed Western analysts. Valves are heavy and power-hungry, but they are also hard to kill with the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear burst and they can be built and repaired by a conscript industry. Reading this as backwardness was the single commonest Western mistake about the aircraft
- Ejection seat
- KM-1M zero-speed, low-altitude seat under a heavy E-2 heat-resistant Plexiglas canopy. The cockpit is unpressurised in the modern sense at the top of the climb; pilots flew in full pressure equipment because at 20,000 m nothing else will keep them alive
04The MiG-25’s operating costs: why no reliable price exists
The MiG-25 was a Soviet state product, never sold on an open dollar market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply does not exist in the public record. Period estimates place it in the low single-digit millions of US dollars — very roughly $3–5 million in 1970s–80s terms — but that should be read as an order-of-magnitude guess, not a sourced figure. No credible cost-per-flight-hour number exists for the type in open sources either. Any precise dollar figure you see attached to a MiG-25 is, in practice, an estimate.
Armament & payload
The MiG-25 carried four enormous missiles, no gun, and a radar that could not look down
The MiG-25 was armed to do one thing and it did not pretend otherwise: put four very large radar-guided and infra-red missiles into a single very large aeroplane flying straight and level a long way up. Four R-40 rounds, no gun, no rocket, no second pass. The R-40 is one of the biggest air-to-air missiles ever fielded, roughly 475 kg apiece, and the reason it is that big is that it was designed to kill the North American B-70 Valkyrie — a target that was cancelled in 1961, before the aeroplane built to intercept it had flown.
What the type was actually asked to do was harder. The Smerch-A radar of the MiG-25P had no look-down capability at all, which meant that against anything flying below the interceptor the entire magazine was so much dead weight. Viktor Belenko handed the West that fact along with the aeroplane in September 1976, and the Soviet response was immediate and expensive: the MiG-25PD entered production in 1978 with the semiconductor Sapfir-25 and a genuine look-down, shoot-down channel, and 459 existing MiG-25Ps were rebuilt to PDS standard from 1979. Very few aircraft have had their armament forced into a rewrite by one pilot’s decision.
In combat the record is thin and mostly disappointing, with one exception that is not. Iraqi MiG-25s claimed something like fifteen aerial victories across the Iran–Iraq War, Colonel Mohammed Rayyan accounting for a large share of them, and on the opening night of Desert Storm, 17 January 1991, Lieutenant Zuhair Dawood of the 96th Squadron fired an R-40 that destroyed the F/A-18C Hornet of Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher — the only US Navy fixed-wing loss to air-to-air fire in the war, and a shoot-down the US Navy attributed to a surface-to-air missile until a CIA reassessment in 2001 concluded it was most likely the MiG. Against that stand the Syrian MiG-25s shot down by Israeli F-15s on 13 February and 29 July 1981 and 31 August 1982, the two Iraqi aircraft lost to USAF F-15s on 19 January 1991, and the MiG-25 killed by an F-16D with the first AMRAAM ever fired in anger on 27 December 1992. Weapon fits varied sharply by mark and operator, and the R-60 capability, the improved R-40RD/TD rounds and the look-down radar all belong to the PD and PDS only; an export MiG-25P of 1980 is not the same weapon system as a Soviet PDS of 1985.
Gun
- None. No MiG-25 of any mark ever carried a gun, internal or podded. The card is kept because the absence is a defining fact about the type: this is a missile-only interceptor in the purest sense, built in the decade when the Americans were re-learning why that was a bad idea.
- There is no cannon port, no ammunition bay and no gun-sight installation on the production airframe. Unlike the Sukhoi Su-15, which could hang UPK-23-250 gun pods under the fuselage, the MiG-25 was never given even that fallback.
- The omission was not an oversight. A gun is useful in a turning fight, and a MiG-25 limited to +4.5 g clean and about 2.2 g with fuel aboard cannot have a turning fight. Weight spent on a cannon would have bought nothing.
- The practical consequence showed in the Gulf: an Iraqi MiG-25 that had fired its four missiles had nothing left to do but run, and running from an F-15 at low fuel state is not a plan.
- The MiG-25BM defence-suppression aircraft, the reconnaissance-bombers and both trainers are equally gunless.
Air-to-air
- 4 × R-40 (AA-6 Acrid) on four wing pylons — among the largest air-to-air missiles ever put into service, around 475 kg apiece with a warhead of some 38–100 kg depending on mark, and quoted engagement ranges of roughly 35–60 km (22–37 miles).
- Always a mixed fit: R-40R semi-active radar-homing paired with R-40T infra-red, fired in pairs at one target so that a single countermeasure could not defeat both seekers. The MiG-25PD/PDS carried the improved R-40RD and R-40TD with better seekers.
- 4 × R-60 or R-60M (AA-8 Aphid) short-range infra-red rounds became available on the MiG-25PD and PDS, typically two R-40RD plus four R-60M on twin launchers. The 43.5 kg R-60 has a reach of about 8 km (5 miles) and exists on this aeroplane as an admission that a missile-only interceptor with four shots and no gun is uncomfortably thin.
- The R-40 was designed to kill big, non-manoeuvring, high-flying targets: the B-70 that was cancelled, the SR-71 that could not be caught, and the B-52 that would have come over the pole. Against a hard-turning fighter it is a poor weapon and everyone involved knew it.
- The MiG-25P’s Smerch-A could not see a target below the horizon at all, so the entire magazine was useless against anything flying low. This is the single deficiency the whole MiG-25PD programme existed to correct.
Air-to-surface guided
- None on the interceptor, ever. The MiG-25P, PD and PDS carried no guided air-to-ground weapon of any kind, were never wired for one, and belonged to the PVO air-defence service rather than to Frontal Aviation.
- MiG-25BM (izdeliye 02M) is the exception and it is a genuinely different aeroplane in role: a dedicated defence-suppression aircraft carrying up to four Kh-58 (AS-11 Kilter) anti-radiation missiles against enemy surface-to-air radars.
- Sources also credit the MiG-25BM with the shorter-ranged, faster Kh-31P (AS-17 Krypton); the evidence for operational Kh-31 carriage is thinner than for the Kh-58 and should be treated with care.
- The BM is the only MiG-25 built to attack a defended target rather than to run past it or photograph it, and it was built in small numbers late in the programme. Its speed was the point: a Mach 2.5 approach gives the defending SAM battery very little time.
- Nothing in the reconnaissance-bomber family carried guided weapons. The RB dropped iron bombs from the stratosphere and nothing else.
Bombs
- 4 × FAB-500M-62T 500 kg (1,100 lb) bombs on the original MiG-25RB, released by the Peleng-D automatic bombing system from about 20,000 m at Mach 2.35 — the aircraft never sees the target and the crew never aims.
- Later reconnaissance-bombers took six FAB-500s on tandem triple ejector racks under the fuselage plus one pylon under each wing, giving loads of eight to ten rounds, roughly 5,000 kg (11,020 lb). The ventral fuel tank and the fuselage bomb racks are mutually exclusive.
- This is supersonic high-altitude area bombing, and it is exactly as accurate as that sounds: Peleng worked from a pre-programmed target coordinate and the inertial system, so the circular error was measured in hundreds of metres. Against an airfield or a city it was adequate; against anything smaller it was not.
- Iraq used the RB in precisely this way against Iranian cities during the War of the Cities, where accuracy was beside the point and immunity from interception was the whole idea.
- No bombs on any interceptor mark. Tables that credit the MiG-25P or PD with a bomb load have imported figures from the reconnaissance-bomber and should be discarded.
Rockets
- None on any mark, in any service, at any time. No unguided rocket pod was ever cleared, carried or trained for.
- The reason is structural and aerodynamic rather than doctrinal: a MiG-25 has four pylons stressed for large missiles or bombs, no low-level attack capability worth the name, and a load factor limit that forbids the diving delivery an unguided rocket needs.
- The MiG-25RBN night reconnaissance prototype carried ten photoflash bombs, which is the closest thing to a salvo weapon in the programme’s history and is not a rocket.
- This card is kept rather than dropped because compilations occasionally list S-5 or S-24 rockets for the type. They are wrong.
Pods & other stores
- Reconnaissance fit, which is what the majority of MiG-25s actually carried: A-70M and A-72 long-focus cameras and topographic camera stations in a nose bay that replaced the radar entirely on the R and RB.
- ELINT and SIGINT: SRS-4A and SRS-9 Virazh on the RBV, Tangazh on the RBT, the Kub-3K system on the RBK and Shar-25 on the RBF. These are internal installations, not pods — the MiG-25 carries almost nothing externally except fuel and weapons.
- Side-looking airborne radar: Sablya-E on the MiG-25RBS and the more capable Shompol on the RBSh, giving a standoff imaging capability along the flight path.
- 1 × 5,300-litre (1,400 US gal) ventral tank on the PD and the reconnaissance-bombers, for transit and ferrying only.
- MiG-25RR: eight aircraft converted with air-sampling equipment to fly through the debris clouds of Chinese nuclear tests between 1970 and 1980 — the least-known and arguably the most useful job the type ever did.
Three typical loadouts
- Alert intercept, MiG-25PDS, PVO regiment, mid-1980s
- 2 × R-40RD semi-active radar-homing and 2 × R-40TD infra-red on the four wing pylons, full internal fuel, no ventral tank. Scrambled from a hard pad under Vozdukh-1M control, climbing to about 19,000 m for a single supersonic firing pass. Endurance from brake release to landing is measured in tens of minutes.
- Mixed intercept, MiG-25PD, against a manoeuvring target
- 2 × R-40RD on the inboard pylons and 4 × R-60M on twin launchers outboard, using the Sapfir-25 radar and the TP-26Sh1 infra-red search and track head. The fit that Iraqi crews flew in 1991; it gives the pilot something to shoot inside 8 km, which the earlier aircraft did not have.
- High-altitude bombing run, MiG-25RB, Iraqi Air Force, War of the Cities
- 4 × FAB-500M-62T under the fuselage, cameras in the nose, Peleng-D bombing system programmed on the ground with the target coordinates. Release at roughly 20,000 m and Mach 2.35 against an Iranian city, with no realistic prospect of interception and no realistic prospect of hitting anything smaller than a district.
Sourcing caveat: MiG-25 weapon data in English rests heavily on the material released after the 1976 teardown and on post-Soviet Russian publications, and the two do not always agree. R-40 warhead and range figures in particular vary between sources by wide margins because the missile went through several marks under one designation. Iraqi and Syrian claims and counter-claims from the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf wars are contested on both sides; where a kill is stated above it is one accepted by more than one independent account. Figures checked on 3 September 2026.
Variants
One fuselage, two aeroplanes, and a defection that forced the second half of the programme
The MiG-25 splits into two families that share a fuselage and very little else. The interceptors — P, PD, PDS — carry a radar in the nose and four missiles under the wing and belong to the PVO, the separate national air-defence service. The reconnaissance aircraft — R, RB and the long string of RB suffixes — carry cameras and electronic-intelligence equipment where the radar would be, fly a slightly different wing, and belong to the reconnaissance regiments of Frontal Aviation. Roughly 1,186 airframes were built at the Gorky plant, a figure Russian Wikipedia gives as 1,119; production ran from the mid-1960s to 1984 or 1985 depending on which delivery is counted as the last.
The programme has one hinge, and it is a person rather than a technology. On 6 September 1976 Senior Lieutenant Viktor Belenko of the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, flew his MiG-25P out of Chuguyevka in Primorsky Krai at low level and landed it at the civil airport at Hakodate in Hokkaido, overrunning the runway. He brought the pilot’s manual with him. Japan allowed a full teardown at Hyakuri; the aircraft went home in thirty crates aboard the Soviet freighter Taigonos on 15 November 1976, and Japan sent Moscow a bill for $40,000 for crating and runway damage while Moscow sent one for $10 million in missing components. Neither is said to have been paid.
What the West actually learned is more interesting than the legend. Not titanium but nickel steel, hand-welded, with rivets left proud where they did not matter. Vacuum tubes rather than transistors — not because the Soviet Union could not make transistors, but because valves survive nuclear electromagnetic pulse and can be built and repaired by an industry that had a great many conscripts and not many microelectronics fabs. Engines with a life of a couple of hundred hours. A load factor limit of +4.5 g clean and about 2.2 g with fuel aboard. Above all: an interceptor, not a fighter, and not the manoeuvring super-fighter the Domodedovo display of 1967 had been read as. That misreading had already done its work — the fear of a Soviet Mach 3 fighter was one of the arguments that carried the American F-X programme through to the F-15, which is a considerably better aeroplane than the misunderstanding that helped fund it.
The Soviet answer to the exposure was two-fold: rebuild the fleet as MiG-25PD and PDS with a look-down radar, and accelerate the successor. That successor is the MiG-31, and it should not be blurred with this aircraft: the Ye-155MP flew on 16 September 1975, entered service in 1981, and is a two-crew aeroplane with a passive electronically scanned Zaslon radar, an airframe stressed for supersonic flight at low level, and roughly double the range. It has its own page. Everything below is MiG-25.
- Ye-155R-1 and Ye-155P-1 (1964, prototypes)
- The reconnaissance prototype flew first, on 6 March 1964, and the interceptor prototype on 9 September 1964. Design work had begun in mid-1959, before the Soviets knew of the American A-12 — the MiG-25 was a response to the B-70 and to the U-2, not to Oxcart.
- MiG-25P Foxbat-A (izdeliye 84; 1971–1982, about 460 built)
- The original interceptor: Smerch-A vacuum-tube radar with no look-down capability, four R-40 missiles, R-15B-300 engines. This is the aeroplane Belenko delivered, and after 1976 it was obsolete as a secret if not quite as a weapon.
- MiG-25PD Foxbat-E (izdeliye 84D; 1978–1984, 104 built)
- The forced rewrite. Sapfir-25 pulse-Doppler radar with look-down and shoot-down, TP-26Sh1 infra-red search and track under the nose, R-60 capability, R-15BD-300 engines with a far longer life. Entered service in 1979.
- MiG-25PDS (from 1979, 459 MiG-25P airframes rebuilt)
- The same upgrade applied to existing aircraft rather than new-build. Numerically this is the most common MiG-25 interceptor of all, and it is the reason the type stayed credible into the late 1980s.
- MiG-25R and MiG-25RB Foxbat-B (izdeliye 02 / 02B; from 1969 and 1970)
- Cameras and ELINT in place of the radar; the RB added the Peleng-D automatic bombing system and four FAB-500s, making it a reconnaissance-bomber that could attack from 20,000 m at Mach 2.35 without ever seeing the target.
- MiG-25RBV, RBT, RBK, RBF, RBS, RBSh (1970s–1980s, the recce suffixes)
- Successive electronic-intelligence and radar-imaging fits on the same airframe: SRS-9 Virazh, Tangazh, Kub-3K, Shar-25, and the Sablya-E and Shompol side-looking radars. The suffix salad is the clearest evidence that the MiG-25’s real career was reconnaissance, not interception.
- MiG-25BM (izdeliye 02M, late programme, small numbers)
- Defence suppression: up to four Kh-58 anti-radiation missiles against enemy SAM radars, with a Mach 2.5 approach as the survivability argument. The only MiG-25 built to attack a defended target rather than avoid one.
- MiG-25PU and MiG-25RU (izdeliye 22 and 39, trainers)
- Two-seat conversion trainers with a second cockpit stepped down ahead of the standard one. Neither has a radar or any weapon channel; there was never a combat-capable two-seat MiG-25, and the PU is unmistakable in photographs for its drooping second canopy.
- MiG-25M / Ye-266M (1974–1977, two or three airframes)
- Record aircraft with uprated R-15BF2-300 engines. On 31 August 1977 Alexander Fedotov took one to 37,650 m (123,520 ft), the absolute altitude record for an air-breathing aeroplane taking off under its own power. It still stands. The production MiG-25M was never built.
- Export MiG-25PD, RB and PU (1979 onwards: Algeria, Bulgaria, India, Iraq, Libya, Syria)
- Algeria took some 36 aircraft, India six MiG-25RBK and two MiG-25RU as the "Garuda" flight, Iraq around 35 of all types, Libya perhaps 96, Syria some 28–30 and Bulgaria four. Export sets were downgraded, and export crews flew without the Soviet ground-control network that made the aeroplane work.
There is no operators-today section on this page because, as of 3 September 2026, no MiG-25 fleet can be corroborated in front-line service by two independent sources. Russia withdrew its last reconnaissance airframes in the early 2010s — roughly 40 MiG-25R and 30 trainers were still carried on the books in 2011 — and the type is gone from Russian order-of-battle listings. Syria’s remaining aircraft, long largely unserviceable, were destroyed by Israeli air strikes after the fall of the Assad government in December 2024. Algeria officially retired the MiG-25 from front-line service in July 2022; reports of a partial reactivation for reconnaissance persist and airworthy examples have appeared in parades, but the type no longer appears in the Algerian Air Force inventory tables, and one contested operator is not a fleet chart. Libya’s aircraft were grounded for lack of maintenance well before the civil war and attempts to revive them in 2014–2015 came to nothing; India retired its Garuda flight in 2006, Bulgaria in 1991, Belarus by 1995, and Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan disposed of their inherited airframes in the 1990s and 2000s. Iraq’s survivors were famously buried in the desert in 2003 and dug up by American forces. Preserved MiG-25s are original airframes throughout — nobody has built a MiG-25 replica and nobody sensibly could — and something on the order of forty are on public display, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, India, Bulgaria and the United States, where the National Museum of the United States Air Force displays an ex-Iraqi aircraft. None is airworthy in the West and none is likely to fly again.
From Cold-War threat to Cold-War relic
Programme begins
The Mikoyan-Gurevich bureau starts work on the Ye-155 to counter US Mach-3 threats such as the XB-70 Valkyrie.
First flight
The reconnaissance prototype Ye-155-R1 flies on 6 March; the interceptor prototype follows in September.
Enters service
The MiG-25 joins the Soviet PVO air-defence force as a dedicated high-speed interceptor.
The Sinai sprint
Soviet-crewed reconnaissance Foxbats overfly Israeli-held Sinai, outrunning intercepting F-4 Phantoms at Mach 3.2.
Belenko defects
On 6 September, Lt Viktor Belenko lands an intact MiG-25 at Hakodate, Japan — an intelligence windfall for the West.
Edge of space
Test pilot Alexander Fedotov zoom-climbs to 37,650 m — still the absolute altitude record for an air-breathing aircraft.
The Speicher kill
An Iraqi MiG-25 downs a US Navy F/A-18 on the first night of Desert Storm — the only US fixed-wing air-to-air loss of the war.
MiGFlug flies civilians to the edge of space
MiGFlug offers Edge of Space flights in the MiG-25 from 2004 to 2006 — paying passengers ride the Foxbat to the stratosphere. The highest a MiGFlug customer ever reached was 25.5 km (about 83,600 ft), well into the black-sky edge of space with the curvature of the Earth in view.
The last Foxbats
Algeria retires its fleet (2022); Syria’s surviving airframes are reportedly destroyed (2024). The type passes into history.
From the cockpit: twelve Foxbat stories
The bomber that started it all
The Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie and other US high-fliers drove the PVO’s 1958 requirement.
Read the full story
The Sinai sprint
A Soviet-crewed recon MiG-25 hit Mach 3.2 to escape an Israeli F-4 — and wrecked its engines doing it.
Read the full story
Belenko’s 30-second landing
Lt Viktor Belenko reportedly touched down at Hakodate with about 30 seconds of fuel left, overshooting the runway.
Read the full story
“Rust through the paint”
Western engineers expected titanium and microchips. They found steel and vacuum tubes.
Read the full story
Burn-through radar
The ‘Fox Fire’ radar’s huge vacuum-tube output was meant to overpower jamming by brute force.
Read the full story
The Eagle’s inspiration
Western fear of a ‘super-Foxbat’ helped justify the F-15 Eagle programme.
Read the full story
Fedotov’s edge of space
On 31 August 1977 test pilot Alexander Fedotov zoom-climbed to 37,650 m.
Read the full story
The Speicher mystery
The 1991 loss of Scott Speicher’s F/A-18 was blamed for years on a SAM, then on a MiG-25.
Read the full story
Buried Foxbats
After 2003, coalition forces found Iraqi MiG-25s buried in the desert sand.
Read the full story
Colonel Rayyan’s tally
Iraq’s leading Foxbat pilot scored multiple kills before being shot down by Iranian F-14s.
Read the full story
Foxbat to Foxhound
The MiG-25’s limits led directly to the MiG-31 ‘Foxhound.’
Read the full story
The record that fooled the West
The 1960s ‘Ye-266’ record flights convinced NATO the USSR had a Mach-3 super-fighter.
Read the full story
The Foxbat in pictures
The Foxbat in motion
Mustard: This Jet Terrified the West — The MiG-25 Foxbat. A polished documentary on the West’s Foxbat panic, the engineering and the Belenko defection — several million views.
Where the Foxbat flew
The score that defines it
The MiG-25 rarely dogfought — that was never its job. Its record is written in speed, altitude and a single, famous night kill over Iraq. Every confirmed air-to-air kill in its history was scored by Iraq; its most enduring victories were the ones where it simply outran everything sent to catch it.
Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026.
Everything people ask about the MiG-25
Can I fly in a MiG-25?
How fast is the MiG-25?
Is the MiG-25 made of titanium?
Did a MiG-25 ever shoot down a US jet?
How high can a MiG-25 fly?
Why did Viktor Belenko defect?
What replaced the MiG-25?
Is the MiG-25 still in service?
You can no longer fly the MiG-25.
These, you still can.
Some legends only live in museums — others are fuelled and waiting. MiGFlug has put civilians in real military jet cockpits since 2004.
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Fly the MiG-21The Cold War’s most-produced jet
Fly the T-33 Shooting StarAmerica’s first jet trainer
Fly the DH VampireA piece of early jet history
Fly the S.211Agile Italian jet trainer
Fly the MB-326The classic Aermacchi jet
Fly the MiG-15The Soviet legend of the Korean WarContinue the tour
Every fact, checked
- John Barron — MiG Pilot: The Final Escape of Lieutenant Belenko (1980)The definitive account of the 1976 defection and primary source for the Belenko anecdotes.
- The AviationistBelenko defection retrospective and the Sinai overflight history.
- The Aviation Geek ClubFedotov’s 1977 altitude record and the Israeli-front reconnaissance flights.
- FAI records databaseOfficial world-record classifications flown under the “Ye-266” cover name.
- Guinness World RecordsOfficial highest-altitude flight: 37,650 m, Fedotov, 1977.
- 19FortyFiveMiG-25 origins, technical analysis and the Speicher shootdown.
- The National InterestSinai spy-flights and the record-altitude story.
- National Museum of the US Air ForceReference for preserved MiG-25 airframes on display.