Morning in the Nevada high desert, sometime in the early 1980s. Heat is already shimmering off a runway that appears on no aeronautical chart worth trusting. A fighter pilot fresh from Nellis Air Force Base rolls out of a turn at 15,000 feet and sees something his intelligence briefings have only ever shown him in grainy photographs: a small silver delta with a red star on its flank, pulling toward him. His heart rate spikes. That reaction has a name in the squadron he is about to meet. They call it buck fever, and curing it is their entire job.

The unit was the 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron, call sign "Red Eagles", and between 1977 and 1988 it operated genuine Soviet-built MiG-17s, MiG-21s and MiG-23s from the Tonopah Test Range Airport, roughly 70 miles northwest of Groom Lake. The program's name was Constant Peg. Its existence remained formally classified until November 2006.

The USAF's own declassified mini-documentary on the Red Eagles of Constant Peg.

From Have Doughnut to Constant Peg

The story begins, with technical precision, in 1968. When Israel obtained an Iraqi MiG-21 through the defection of pilot Munir Redfa in 1966, the aircraft was loaned to the United States and evaluated at Groom Lake under the code name Have Doughnut. Two ex-Syrian MiG-17s followed in 1969 under Have Drill and Have Ferry. These were exploitation programs: performance measurement, systems analysis, and limited trial combat against US types. The results were sobering. In early Have Drill engagements, no Navy pilot won his first fight against the MiG-17.

The context was Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1968 the US Air Force was trading roughly one of its own aircraft for every two MiGs shot down, an unacceptable ratio against a supposedly inferior opponent. The Navy responded by founding Topgun in 1969, fed directly with Have Doughnut and Have Drill data, and its kill ratio improved sharply. The Air Force lagged, and a group of frustrated veterans decided the fix was not another paper study but a permanent squadron of real MiGs, flown daily against ordinary front-line crews.

The driving force was Colonel Gaillard "Gail" Peck Jr., a Vietnam F-4 pilot then working in the Pentagon. His proposal won the backing of Major General Hoyt S. Vandenberg Jr., and the program name was assembled from Vandenberg's call sign, "Constant", and the nickname of Peck's wife, Peg. The 4477th stood up on 1 April 1977; by July 1979 regular MiG training sorties were flying from a purpose-expanded strip at Tonopah, an airfield Peck first sketched on an airline napkin. The base was remote enough that it was not publicly acknowledged as a military airfield until 1985, by which time it was also quietly hosting the F-117 program at night.

Swamps, Scrapyards and Diplomatic Channels

Where do you buy MiGs when you are the US Air Force? Anywhere you can. Israel supplied captured Syrian and Iraqi machines. Indonesia sold stored MiG-21F-13s in the early 1970s, a deal later balanced with deliveries of F-5E Tiger IIs. After Egypt broke with Moscow, it reportedly provided MiG-23s as part of an arms relationship that brought Cairo F-4E Phantoms. In 1987 the squadron even bought twelve factory-fresh Chinese-built J-7Bs, MiG-21 copies. In US paperwork the jets carried cover designations: YF-110 for the MiG-21, YF-113 for the MiG-23, YF-114 for the MiG-17.

The aircraft arrived without manuals, without spare parts and frequently without airworthiness. The squadron's maintainers, living in double-wide trailers with tires holding the roofs down against the desert wind, reverse-engineered brake assemblies, reconditioned engines with a design life of 500 hours, and occasionally received newly manufactured parts painstakingly copied from worn originals. Their accident rate, former officials later said, ran to about 100 per 100,000 flying hours, an order of magnitude above the Air Force norm.

The results were consistent enough to bet lives on. To minimize risk, the MiGs never flew at night or in bad weather, and sorties were short, around 20 minutes, dictated by the small fuel loads of the types. The MiG-17 was retired by 1982 as obsolete and increasingly unsafe; the MiG-21 became the workhorse; and the swing-wing MiG-23, fast in a straight line and unstable everywhere else, was reserved for the squadron's most experienced hands.

Exposure: Curing Buck Fever

The syllabus was deliberately incremental. A visiting fighter crew, often not officially told what awaited them, first flew a performance profile alongside the MiG simply to look at it, because the shock of the first sighting was itself the enemy. Then came one-versus-one offensive and defensive setups, then two-versus-two, and eventually many-versus-many engagements woven into Red Flag exercises. Every phase ended in long debriefs. The lessons were concrete: do not turn with a MiG-17, take the fight vertical; do not slow down against a MiG-21; and if a MiG-23 pilot makes the mistake of turning instead of running, he is yours.

The numbers, confirmed when the US Air Force declassified the program in 2006, are remarkable in the sober sense of the word: more than 15,000 sorties flown and nearly 6,000 American aircrew given direct exposure to Soviet hardware. Sixty-nine pilots served as Red Eagles, each issued a sequential "Bandit" number. They were drawn from the Fighter Weapons School, Topgun and the Aggressor squadrons, typically with 2,000 to 3,000 hours behind them.

The risks were not theoretical. Navy Lieutenant M. Hugh Brown, Bandit 12, died on 23 August 1979 when his MiG-17 entered a second spin too low to eject. Air Force Captain Mark Postai was killed in a MiG-23 crash on 21 October 1982; his family learned the true circumstances only around the 2006 declassification. Technical Sergeant Rey Hernandez died in a ground accident.

Constant Peg pilots react to previously unreleased footage of their MiGs, via 10 Percent True.

The Cost, the General, and the Legacy

And on 26 April 1984, Lieutenant General Robert M. Bond, vice commander of Air Force Systems Command, was killed attempting a high-speed ejection from a MiG-23 over the Nevada Test Site. Precision requires a distinction here: Bond was flying with the separate "Red Hats" exploitation unit at Groom Lake, not the 4477th, a point the Air Force itself made when it declassified Constant Peg. A three-star general dying in a Soviet fighter over Nevada nonetheless forced awkward questions years before the program was acknowledged.

Constant Peg ended for unglamorous reasons: money, aging airframes, and a new generation of Soviet types the old fleet could no longer represent. The last sorties were flown on 4 March 1988, and the squadron was formally inactivated on 15 July 1990. Several of its MiGs stand in museums today; the fate of others remains classified. Foreign materiel exploitation itself never stopped, and repeated sightings of Su-27s and MiG-29s over Nevada suggest the mission simply returned to deeper shadow.

The accounting, in the end, is favourable. The exposure training pioneered at Tonopah flows directly into today's Aggressor squadrons, whose paint schemes still echo the Red Eagles' jets. In Operation Desert Storm, US Air Force pilots destroyed some 40 Iraqi aircraft, including MiG-21s and MiG-23s, without a single air-to-air loss; many credit the men who spent a decade making sure no American pilot ever saw a red star for the first time in combat. How some of those first MiGs reached the West at all — via a spy, a pilot and a stolen MiG-21 — is a story we told here last week.

Sources: National Museum of the United States Air Force, Air & Space Forces Magazine (April 2007), The War Zone, Steve Davies' Red Eagles, Wikipedia