What would have happened if the Russian Aces kept flying the MiGs throughout the Korean War?

The USSR never officially entered the Korean War, but on 1 Nov 1950, the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps was attached to the PLAAF and Soviet-piloted MiG-15s began operating over North Korea. At first, the Soviets had the advantage until the U.S. put F-86 Sabres into the fight on 17 Dec 1950. The area of conflict came to be known as MiG Alley. The UN pilots were hampered by the order to not cross the Yalu River. The Soviets had no such limitation.

The conflict between UN Command and Soviet pilots continued until the cease fire on 27 Jul 1953. So, Russian pilots were flying for most of the Korean War.

As to the aces, the top ones were Nikolay Sutyagin with a claimed 21 kills including 9 F-86s. Yevgeni G. Pepelyayev credited with 19 kills, and Lev Kirilovich credited with 17 kills.

The UN top aces were Capt. Joseph C. McConnell with 16 MiGs claimed. Major James Jabara was the first UN ace and had 15 MiGs claimed. Major Frederick Blesse claimed 9 MiGs and Colonel James P. Hagerstrom with 8.5 kills. Hagerstrom was also an ace in World War II.

By the time of the cease fire, F-86 pilots had claimed 792 MiGs destroyed in air-to-air combat with a loss of 78 F-86s. A 10:1 kill ration.

Source: MiG Alley - Wikipedia

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Would you call it historical revisionism to remove Confederate monuments 150 years after the Civil War?

No. It is not historical revisionism to remove statues or rename buildings etc. for racists, or for any other reason. But why limit it to Confederate Civil War generals, politicians and slave owners? There are many slave owners and racists who have been honored with monuments, statutes and buildings. If some, why not all? First let’s deal with the term “Traitor” that many respondents have used for the Confederates. The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the war between the colonies and Great Britain. It’s first article declared the 13 colonies “to be free, sovereign and independent states.” In 1787, these 13 sovereign nations came together as principals and created the federal government as their agent for specific activities, i.e. “enumerated powers”. Principals have the right to fire their agent and withdraw from the pact, that is secede. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state. James Madison rejected...
Read more

In war, does life expectancy go up with battle experience?

I would say yes to a certain degree. Skills are learned when you are in combat that are not learned in training. Some of it is just luck. This assumes that other things are equal. Not all combat is equal by any means. Some jobs are just less dangerous than others even in active combat operations. For instance incoming artillery rounds sound different from outgoing artillery rounds. I learned this from experience in about one day. The luck comes in when the spot you picked to take cover in gets hit or not. The first you have some control over, but absolutely no control over the second. This information is from Korea. Experiences after that may be different.
Read more

Read This First

Posts containing questions and answers are not in any particular order. You can search for a topic in the search bar or click on the Index to choose from an alphabetical list of topics. To see the original posts, go to his profile on  Quora.com .
Read more