Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's personal MiG-29 fighter jet goes under the hammer As late Microsoftie Paul Allen's estate is gradually wound down, the gems from his collection of rare and historic aircraft are coming up for auction – including his personal two-seat MiG-29 Russian fighter jet. Allen, who died from cancer in October 2018, was well known in aviation enthusiast circles for his dedication to …
I think Ellison already had one. When Bill Gates was building his house, Ellison quipped something like the front door being big enough to fire a missile through.
I remember reading about a bunch of ex-Ukrainian jets being imported & converted so they were legal to fly in the US, and think his was a single-seat version.
(I also had a fun chat with some of Allen's Octopus crew when that came to London for the Olympics. It was as much (if not more) a survey ship than the typical floating gin palaces moored nearby because of Allen's interests in marine exploration.)
Russians back then mirrored the USAF practice of having expensive, more powerful models (F-14, F-15) and 'cheaper', more limited models (F-16, F-18), also better suited to be exported. The MiG was the cheaper option compared to the Su-27, and also easier to export too. Both countries didn't want to export their state of the art technology to less reliable countries, and anyway many allies weren't willingly to pay for the more expensive models.
So was I. I think it is just illegal to buy aircraft that is militarised, or equipped with weapons, military mission systems eg fire control radars, or any other type of equipment or systems which have national security classifications.
Then again, I suppose throw enough money at the problem ...
I think it is just illegal to buy aircraft that is militarised, or equipped with weapons, military mission systems eg fire control radars, or any other type of equipment or systems which have national security classifications.
You're right. The plane has to be "civilianized" (for lack of a better term). All war-fighter gear removed.
In the UK there are certain scenarios that allow the breaking of a the sound barrier by military aircraft. This happened recently when a passenger jet lost comms. ATC scrambled the RAF, a number of claims have been made, including costs to replace glass panels in a greenhouse a patio window and a broken chandelier. I lived in the Lake District where RAF pilots carried out their training... Farmers where entitled to compensation for sheep who keeled over and died because of the shock, apparently sheep don't do well with surprises.
Toodle Pip.
I believe you can own a supersonic aircraft as long as you are quiet about it.
There are a couple of sections in the FAR (Federal Aviation Regulations) about them - FAR91.821 for example - that are mainly concerned with noise limits - essentially they must meet stage 2 noise limits for take off and landing and you cannot operate it above Mach 1 unless you can show that the sonic boom will not reach the surface.
The language in FARs about "reaching the surface" I beleive is more to do with the issue of going supersonic in coastal areas - you have to be far enough offshore that the sonic boom doesn't reach land - for Concorde the sonic boom track was up to 100km wide.
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The SU27 isn't a more modern design than the MIG29. They are actually from the same era. Both had first flights in 1977, with the Flanker actually flying first. Both entered service in the early 80s. They have the same design queues with the Flanker looking like a scaled up Fulcrum. Both have been evolved into much more capable modern aircraft.
During the cold war and before the internet was popular countries kept the development and deployment of military equipment a secret instead of releasing press releases. Military intelligence often got pictures of new equipment from satilite photography, camera on our jets and sketches from spies long before finding out the (Russian) names and designations of the equipment.
In order to prevent total confusion when the ~20 different countries in NATO during the cold war found out and communicated information about a particular aircraft they were assigned a NATO reporting name so everybody had one name, long before knowing which (Russian) company had built the things or what the Russian names were. Given the NATO reporting names and pictures of the aircraft often weren't classified this became public knowledge in magazines, and you had things like Airfix kits produced and sold under NATO reporting names long before we knew what the Russians called the things, or even what the aircraft was designed for.
The most well known NATO reporting names of the aircraft later known as the MiG29 was Fulcrum, and the SU27 was assigned the name of Flanker. The Tupolov 95 is for instance is still better known under the name "Bear", and it still gets named like this in news reports these days.
It's one of those context things. Almost everybody who has been interested in aviation knows this and it doesn't need much explaining.
VAAC Harrier had systems that augmented the hover flight and transition controls turning the aircraft into a much more benign aircraft in that part of its flight where the standard Harrier was not forgiving of any error. This work was being done a long time ago (decades) when I was around Cranfield and Thurleigh. It's strange to think that the latest version of that work is only just coming into service in UK military.
It is well known (see page 235) that the MiG-15 of which upto 15000 were produced was powered by a Soviet versions of the Rolls-Royce Derwent and Nene engines, which the Soviet Union bought from Britain in 1947. Stalin had been skeptical that Britain would sell these engines - What kind of fool would be willing to sell his secrets! he had reportedly said - but the British government agreed to the sale.
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