USTDC

Photo of USTDC courtesy of Les Duffin

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Another MIG

Here's another photo from Stev Pitchford. This one is of another MIG whose pilot defected to Taiwan.

Stev writes:

Here is a crowd viewing a MIG-15 on display in downtown Taipei. It was flown to Taiwan by a Chinese Communist defector in late 1959 or early 1960. While the details are written on the poster by the plane, my Chinese never got past recognizing a few symbols on buses so I'd know which one to catch, so I can't translate it for you.
One of the photo lab's functions was processing aerial reconnaissance film. In the spring of 1960, Lt. Colonel Tinsley walked into the lab proudly pointing to a spot in the middle of a print he was carrying. The spot was flying at well above 40,000 feet and whatever took the picture was way above that. Because it was a long time ago, I may be mixing my MIGs, but I think he said it was a MIG-21. In any case, it was the first evidence they had that a MIG of that generation was flying in Communist China.

2 comments:

Don said...

I did a little checking and discovered that this may be the first MIG-15 flown from the PROC to the ROC.

On January 12, 1960, a PLA pilot named Yang Decai flew a MiG-15 with serial number 6501 from Luqiao Air Base to Yilan County, Taiwan. However, Yang was killed when his aircraft crashed on landing.

There appears to be a lot of damage to the MIG-15 in the photo, so it could very well be the pieced-together remains of the crashed aircraft.

Anonymous said...

I remember there were air fighters flying from mainland China to Taiwan every once in a while. It became part of my childhood memories.