Re: Building Your Own Air Force

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<Greasy Rider© @ invalid.com> wrote in message
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> (Received this today and can't vouch for the veracity but it makes an
> interesting read. )
>
>
> Building Your Own Air Force, One Mig at a Time How a supersonic speed
> freak snuck Soviet fighters out of Kyrgyzstan and started flying
> "enemy" jets for the Pentagon. By Carl Hoffman
>
> In a cavernous airplane hangar in Quincy, Illinois, two hours south of
> Chicago, Don Kirlin paces beneath the gold hammer and sickle of a
> large Soviet flag. Around him are the military bulwarks of the
> once-formidable Evil Empire: four Czech Aero Vodochody L-59 Super
> Albatross fighter jets, perched in two rows. In another Kirlin hangar
> next door sits a Soviet MiG-21 Mongol, the bane of US pilots in
> Vietnam. Outside, on the flight line, are seven Czech L-39s, still
> bearing red Communist stars. And just beyond them, almost invisible in
> dusky-gray and sky-blue paint, two MiG-29 Fulcrums. The pride of the
> hallowed -Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau, the Russian equivalent of
> Lockheed Martin, the Fulcrum has a top speed of Mach 2.4 - hundreds of
> miles per hour faster than an American F-16 Eagle or F/A-18 Hornet -
> and remains one of Russia's preeminent fighters.
>
> A decade ago, only sovereign nations could afford to buy and maintain
> sophisticated, high-performance fighters. But Kirlin's unmarked
> hangars contain an air force more formidable than that of many
> countries. He has 30 jets in flying condition, 10 in line for
> maintenance, and dozens more to be delivered. His MiG-29 Fulcrums,
> designed in the late 1970s to go head-to-head with the hottest US
> planes, are the only privately owned Fulcrums in the world. Kirlin
> breaks into a big smile whenever he looks at them.
>
> "Check this out," Kirlin says, leading me into a back room and opening
> a steel cabinet. He takes out a white cotton bag. Inside it is a
> pilot's helmet that connects to the plane's laser-guided tracking
> system. The result: A MiG-29 pilot can precisely target a missile just
> by looking in a certain direction. Federal regulations require all
> military equipment owned by civilians to be disabled, but somehow -
> "Can't tell you," Kirlin says - the Fulcrum's radar weapons systems
> are intact. The plane is no match for a US fighter's sophisticated
> avionics in an encounter beyond visual range. But if it can survive
> long enough to come within view of that fighter, the MiG-29's ability
> to fly at high angles of attack becomes a distinct advantage - and
> where the pilot's eyes aim, so does its weapon.
>
> Kirlin's collection began as a rich man's game to own the baddest toys
> money can buy. Then he realized there were others who coveted the
> planes as much as he did. So he started a business, Air USA, to sell
> L-39s to doctors and executives looking for a nifty flying sports car
> with twin ejection seats, capable of aerobic loops and rolls and
> approaching the speed of sound. As Kirlin puts it, why plod about at
> 120 mph in a $300,000 Cessna when you can fly four times as fast in an
> L-39 that costs the same and looks a hundred times sexier? "Look at
> this," he says, whipping open the forward avionics bay in the nose of
> an L-39. "We strip out the old stuff, put in light American avionics,
> save 800 pounds, and there's enough room for a set of golf clubs!"
> Built to fly in and out of dirt airstrips throughout the Soviet
> empire, the L-39 is so sturdy, Kirlin says, "This is the only tactical
> jet fighter that you could - if the Federal Aviation Administration
> would let you - land right on the golf course, play a round, and then
> head home! How cool is that?"
>
> Cool enough - but Kirlin had even bigger ideas. In the past few years,
> he has built an entirely new and booming business hiring out his
> fighter jets and pilots to the US gov-ernment for training exercises.
> The Navy deactivated its last full-time adversary squadron in 1996
> amid shrinking defense budgets and aging aircraft, even as training
> demands increased. And there was Kirlin, sitting on all those former
> Eastern bloc fighters maintained by factory-trained mechanics. So the
> Navy came calling. "Iraq was flying three kinds of plane when we
> invaded," he says. "The L-39, the MiG-21, and the MiG-29, which are
> three of the four airplanes that Air USA owns." Now Navy fighter jocks
> train against Kirlin pilots flying Kirlin planes. With 16 aircraft
> available for Navy exercises, Kirlin has more fighters in the air than
> any of the four other companies currently flying for the Pentagon.
>
> Kirlin owes his operation to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
> elegant crudeness of its technology. "When the Soviets built an
> airplane, they intended it to serve for 50 years, maintained in the
> middle of nowhere by a kid who could barely read, using a tool kit not
> much bigger than a box of fishing tackle." By comparison, he explains,
> a US warplane is designed around one parameter - performance. Price
> and complexity are barely considered. "All Americans want is a
> thoroughbred, but the Russians, they want quarter horses. And lots of
> 'em. Their whole design philosophy is based on simplicity and
> reliability."
>
> As an example, Kirlin rattles off the L-39's features: efficient turbo
> fan engines that need little maintenance and can fly for three hours
> on a single tank of gas; mechanical flight controls; heavy-duty
> landing gear and tires for takeoff and landing on unimproved dirt
> airstrips. Nearly 3,000 were built throughout the 1980s and 1990s,
> making them modern and plentiful, with an abundance of spare parts -
> the perfect aircraft, as it turned out, to dependably and profitably
> challenge the US military.
>
> As Kirlin is talking, two men who look like they've been sent over by
> a Hollywood casting agent walk into the hangar. Tom Leonard and Pete
> Pettigrew are both in their early sixties, lean and 6 feet tall, with
> short silver hair. Pettigrew is a retired Navy Reserve rear admiral
> with 20,000 cockpit hours and a kill on a MiG-21 over Vietnam in 1972.
> Leonard is a retired lieutenant colonel and Navy Top Gun graduate.
> Both are just in from San Diego. Tomorrow they'll fly back in two of
> Kirlin's L-59s for 10 days of offshore operations against the aircraft
> carrier Vinson and its battle group. Kirlin employs a cadre of 20
> similarly experienced former fighter jocks, including himself.
>
> Some of what his air force does can be mundane - towing targets on
> 10,000 feet of cable for other jets to shoot down, for example - but
> increasingly his pilots are being called upon to pierce the air
> defenses of Navy aircraft carrier battle groups. The scenarios vary,
> but typically Kirlin's birdsdive toward the carriers from 25,000 feet
> up and 200 miles out, pretending either to be incoming missiles or
> enemy fighters. "Gone are the days and tactics of the movie Top Gun,
> where you had to turn and burn and get behind 'em to shoot 'em down,"
> says Eric Petersen, adversary requirements officer at the Naval Air
> Forces Headquarters in San Diego. "Now we want to ID someone from 10
> miles out and shoot them down before they even see us. But there are
> 50 different kinds of radar out there, and bandits with different
> radar signatures. It's getting really complex for pilots trying to
> figure out which plane and radar is what." Kirlin's planes can
> simulate those signatures. And a carrier has to be able to identify
> those fighters and scramble its jets off the deck within a few
> minutes. But at first, Petersen says, "we found our pilots a lot less
> ready than we thought they were." The realistic scenarios staged by
> Kirlin and his pilots help. "When it's a foreign aircraft like the
> L-59," he adds, "it's much more intense, believable, and challenging."
>
> The Navy paid Kirlin $840,000 for 200 hours of flight time in 2004.
> This year, says Petersen, Kirlin is already "way beyond that." Even at
> that price it's a bargain, he insists. "Military assets are programmed
> to last a certain period of time, so why not use theirs for less
> challenging missions and save ours for the war?" As Air USA pilot
> Leonard puts it, "We show up, do the job, and go away."
>
> Kirlin imported his first plane in 1994 as the Soviet empire was
> crumbling, after he spotted a photo of an L-39 in an aviation
> magazine. At the time, he was working as a US Airways 737 captain,
> though as heir to the world's largest chain of Hallmark greeting card
> stores he certainly didn't need the job. Kirlin likes powerful
> machines - he roars around Quincy in a restored 1967 Corvette
> convertible - and the notion of obtaining his very own
> high--performance war machine grabbed him and wouldn't let go. "Here
> was a sexy-looking, late-model current--production fighter that could
> go eight-tenths as fast as sound," he says. "I said, 'I'm going on a
> quest to get one.'"
>
> So Don Kirlin moved to Kyrgyzstan. Once he sets his mind to a goal,
> he's relentless. He soloed his first plane at 16, instructed at 18,
> and began flying corporate jets three years later. He flew in the
> Navy, got twin bachelor degrees in business and clinical psychology,
> and then an MBA, all from the University of Northern Colorado, and
> moved on to US Airways. In 1993, he asked the FAA to let him parachute
> from the rear stairway of a Boeing 727, like the infamous skyjacker D.
> B. Cooper, who disappeared over the Cascades with $200,000 in 1971.
> Kirlin shrugs his shoulders and grins. "I just wanted to do it because
> the only other person to do it was Cooper," he says. The FAA said no,
> unless he could prove unequivocally it was safe. A year later, he
> presented 6,500 pages of documents to the agency. He remains to this
> day the only person authorized to operate jumps out of the rear door
> of a 727.
>
> So it wasn't all that surprising when in 1994 Kirlin got on an
> airplane bound for the poor, mountainous country tucked between China,
> Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Kirlin learned Kyrgyzstan was awash in
> planes that it couldn't afford to fly, many having logged little
> flight time. "It was a former USSR training base, and I heard they had
> the most -corrosion-free airplanes in all of the republics," he says.
> He bedded down in Bishkek, hired an interpreter, and got busy. It took
> six months and plenty of vodka-fueled banquets. "Their first answer
> was always 'No, it's not possible,'" he says. "When I said I wanted to
> buy former Soviet military hardware so people in America could fly
> them around as toys, they couldn't believe that I wasn't a spy for the
> US government! But it just takes infinite patience and money. You have
> to immerse yourself in their lives and get them to trust you."
>
> After his first L-39, Kirlin wanted more. More altitude. More
> performance. More bragging rights. Another eight L-39s followed within
> a year, and then two MiG-21s (one of which was subsequently destroyed
> in a crash that killed the pilot). But people like Kirlin who worship
> at the altar of high g forces are never satisfied as long as there's
> some-thing faster out there. And there was: Kyrgyzstan, Kirlin heard,
> might have a MiG-29 or two hidden away.
>
> "It's a mechanical meat-and-potatoes airplane," he says, leading me
> onto the flight line where the two Fulcrums sit. But powerful and
> deadly all the same. "It can take off and head straight up and
> accelerate through the sound barrier to 48,000 feet in 60 seconds!" he
> says, nearly jumping out of his ostrich-skin cowboy boots. "Once I
> heard those numbers I just had to become the only person to own the
> biggest, baddest, fastest machine in the world. Me, chasing the clouds
> in the purest power machine out there. I had to have one."
>
> Wanting one and getting one were two very different things. For
> starters, the Kyrgyzstanis insisted that they didn't have any MiG-29s.
> "'Well, if they did exist,'" Kirlin recalls asking, "'what do you
> think they'd be worth?'" In late 1994, after months of negotiations
> with the ministry of defense, military officers led him to an
> underground bunker at an airfield in Bishkek, where they showed him
> two Fulcrums in surprisingly mint condition.
>
> "They were beautiful," he says. One had flown only 40 hours, the other
> 110. The bargaining continued for another two years, with Kirlin
> shuttling in and out frequently for sometimes tense negotiations
> involving large amounts of cash. "You sit with your briefcase between
> your back and the back of the chair. You're 1,800 miles from Moscow,
> and they could kill you any second."
>
> It took two more years to complete the deal, for a sum he won't even
> ballpark (Russia sold MiG-29s to Malaysia and Peru in 1995 for nearly
> $16 million apiece). "All cash," Kirlin says, pawing through a box of
> photos in his spartan office overlooking the hangar. He pulls out
> shots of him eyeing the two warbirds, surrounded by guys in uniform.
> "It was the beginning of a dream that turned into a nightmare."
>
> Kirlin and his crew dismantled the Fulcrums and packed them in
> custom-made steel crates with covers of rough-hewn wood labeled as
> farm implements. They even built a bridge across a river at the back
> of the base so they could be towed to the train station. Then
> something went wrong. Kirlin is coy about exactly what - it seems that
> the money didn't get where it was supposed to. Suddenly he was
> unwelcome in Kyrgyzstan. With nothing but the clothes on his back, his
> passport, and his bankroll, Kirlin shelled out $1,000 to be driven in
> the trunk of a car from Bishkek across the border to Almaty,
> Kazakhstan.
>
> Meanwhile, the airplanes, loaded on a flatbed railway car and escorted
> by Kirlin's men, were sent to P'ot'i, Georgia, where they were
> supposed to be transferred to a ship. Instead, the government of
> Georgia threatened to confiscate them. Kirlin forked over $40,000 and
> had the Fulcrums brought back into Kyrgyzstan, escorted, as always, by
> his agents, who then chartered a Soviet-era AN-124 - the largest
> commercial airplane in the sky - to fly the planes to Tallinn,
> Estonia, the closest friendly NATO port, where they were quickly
> seized for another three months. After three years and more cash
> outlays required to seal the deal, they arrived in Quincy. Despite
> their low flying time, they need complete overhauls before they can
> safely take wing in the US. Some doubt Kirlin can get them airborne.
> He scoffs: "I've got all the manuals," he says, ever confident. "It's
> just a matter of time and money."
>
> Kirlin has a full-time man in Moscow and another in Prague scouting
> airplanes and buying parts. He has jets stationed in Hawaii and Japan
> to be close to the carrier battle groups Air USA is working with. And
> in his conference room just off the hangar sit the chief engineer and
> two sales-people from Povazske Strojarne Letecke Motory, the Slovak
> Republic company that overhauls the Albatross' jet engines. Kirlin is
> about to take delivery on dozens more L-59s, and he wants the Slovaks
> to rebuild their -motors. But they've been in Quincy for three days,
> they're not budging on their price, and in an hour they're catching a
> plane home. "We must make a decision soon," says an anxious Czech
> mechanic who works for -Kirlin and is acting as a translator. "It's
> all show," -Kirlin replies. "Go back in there and be very gracious.
> Tell them thanks for the price and that I'll think about it."
>
> Moments later, the mechanic reenters the hangar and motions Kirlin
> over. Sure enough, with minutes to spare, the Slovaks have
> capitulated, slashing their starting price by 50 percent. Don Kirlin
> is floating. "Outstanding!" he says, slapping the mechanic on the
> back. "Awesome. I knew it would go our way. It's always the same; you
> just have to wait 'em out." Then, stealing a glance at the hammer and
> sickle, he can't help himself. "America won!" he says with a laugh.
> "We're all they've got now."
>
>
> ---end--


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