The MiG-21: The Legendary Fighter/Interceptor in Soviet and Worldwide Use, 1956 to the Present

I'm a long time MiG-21 enthusiast. I have numerous books about it so I had to add this one in my library. The author is familiar with the MiG-21 as he's been maintaining these aircrafts when he was in the East German airforce. The book includes numerous and big colour photos. It's isn't a book for scale modellers (no walkaround, no profiles, not much technical diagrams) but it's a book to learn about the MiG-21. Chapter 1 explains how the aircraft evolved along its numerous versions Chapter 2 is a technical description of a particular version of the aircraft, the MiG-21MF Chapter 3 presents each versions in detail Equipments, armements and powerplants are presented in chapter 4 to 6. Chapter 7 describe the various upgrade programs that lenghtened the MiG-21s service life. Chapter 8 is devoted to the Chengdu J/F-7 aircrafts produced by PRC. The book ends with it's bigest chapter (about 80 pages) which presents the operational life of the MiG-21 in the former Warsaw Pact countries and Finland. Operational life in other countries (India, Syria, Vietnam, etc) is not covered in this book. Since Yefim Gordon's Famous Russian Aicraft monography is out-of-print for 10 years, Holger Müller's book is todays most complete and but also didactic book about the most iconic Soviet fighter of the Cold War.

disappointment it can compare with famous russian aircraft mig 21 book needs 3 view profiles its too technical lacking info on aircraft service not fun to read or use as reference price good but limitrd usage

must have if you're interested in this aircraft, best one out there, a listing of operators, surpisingly not a lot about the MiG-21 against us in Vietnam, more focused on european ops, if you can only buy one book on fishbed, buy this one

The MiG-21 Fishbed: - was built mostly of aluminum - entered mass production after the private US citizens (Rockefellers) built aluminum smelting plants in Russia - was cheaper to produce than the Soviet BMP (which had armor that had to be welded) - had almost identical performance to the then F-5A Freedom Fighter - was so short in endurance (25min initially) that as soon as an Israeli pilot laid eyes on one, he could do the math in his head and figure out how much fuel it had left -- because he knew where all the MiG-21 bases were - costed 1 million each in 1965, 1/3 of a contemporary F-4 Phantom - initially had such a primitive radar that the pilot had to stick his face in a rubber-lined cylinder to see the display screen (Spock's device in early episodes of Star Trek was based on this) - First production batch was armed with guns only, soon upgraded with Atolls (heat seekers) This is a great book about a great jet. I loved every minute of it. These are my 3 favorite aviation art books: - Aviation Art by Lou Drendel - Airshow by Phillip Castle - Great Fighter Jets of the Galaxy 1 by Tim Gibson

très beau livre en anglais qui valait la carrière du MIG 21

I have books by Yefim Gordon on the Mig 15/17 and 19 and as I couldn't find his mig 21 book for any sort of sensible price decided to get this book instead. When it came I was very impressed, the cover photo is great (different to the one shown above) and a quick flick through revealed lots of other good photos and high quality paper. However, having just finished reading it I am not so happy. There are no line drawings of each major type and no colour drawings of planes from various operators. This is a shame as these parts of my earlier mig books are very enjoyable. The book does cover the major versions, development history etc but i felt the Yefim books had more depth. Even though the book cover mentions worldwide use, only European operators are covered albeit in great detail. Chinese versions are covered too. Sadly for such a high quality book there seems to have been little edditing. There are numerous grammatical/writing errors and several incorrect photos (e.g. two cockpit comparisson photos side by side, good idea but both photos are the same this is actually shown in sample pages above, p202 supposedly a Polish single seat mig 21PFM, definately a 2 seat trainer which I think is Pakistani). Given the price of the book this is unforgivable. So I give this book 3 stars 1 for the general info. which is ok, one for the great photos and 1 for the physical quality. I don't give a star for the errors and another for the lack of worldwide operator coverage. If you like great aircraft photos I recommend this book, if you are more interested in data/operations then you might want to look elsewhere.

The first disappointment is that this is not a proper hardback, being merely casebound. The treatment,is also rather superficial by comparison with the Crecy Publishing series of books on Russian/ Soviet aircraft. In addition it is printed in a "trendy" sans serif font which makes the printed page unpleasant to look at and more difficult to read. Many of the illustrations are of redundant aircraft and have poor captions. Let us hope the Gordon/Komissarov book on the MiG21 is soon re-published.