Product Description

This is the complete, comprehensive history of the famous Mikoyan Design Bureau, from its establishment in 1939 to the present day. Every aircraft type developed by the Mikoyan OKB is covered in detail, with descriptions of all known versions and a wealth of recently declassified data.
Line drawings are included for each major type, illustrating the difference between the versions, and there are also representative color side views and specification tables allowing the performance of different versions to be compared.
Production figures and information on MiG aircraft operated abroad are also included. The book contains an impressive array of previously unpublished photographs, which will delight all fans of Russian aviation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297107 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 540 pages

About the Author
Yefim Gordon is one of Russia's leading aviation writers and publishers. He is the author of numerous books on Soviet aviation.

Dmitriy Komissarov is rapidly establishing himself as a respected authority on Russian and Soviet aviation. He works in the publishing industry and lives in Moscow.

Customer Reviews

Make no mistake, this is an excellent book...
...but there was a let down in production values.

In the early '90s there was a book entitled "OKB MiG" by the same publisher. It was good for it's time but the flood of new information on Russian military hardware (and the appetite for it) was only beginning. With four newer and better OKB titles released the MiG title was ripe for overhaul. Once "OKB Mikoyan" was announced I put my copy of "OKB MiG" on the sale list.

It is certainly a vast improvement on the original. Authors Gordon and Komissarov should be familiar names to any Soviet/Russian aerospace enthusiast and their efforts here are well up to the high standards they've set in other books. They held up their end.

However, the production values slipped in a number of respects and this prevented the book from getting 5 stars.

1. Most seriously, the poor reproduction of the line drawings in the first half of the book. Up through and including the MiG-19 the drawings look like multiple generation copies of originals. Pixelation, jagged lines, lines dropping out, are all in evidence. Thankfully, from the MiG-21 series onward there is much improvement.

2. There are numerous "editing glitches" in the book. Photo captions sometimes refer to photos on the opposite page which aren't there. Obviously a layout change didn't catch up with the captions. The paragraph that introduces chapters 7 (combat projects) and 8 (commercial aircraft) are identical. The paragraph for chapter 7 was lost at some point.

3. A fair amount of typos in this book. This is unavoidable in a work this size with so many alphanumerical designations but it seemed excessive. A lot of botched metric to English conversions (when in doubt go with the metric).

4. For whatever reason there was a decision not to cover Chinese variants of the MiG-21 even though Chinese versions of previous MiG fighters *were* covered. Also there was no coverage of the MiG-21's combat career even though all other aircraft have such coverage. Why?

All this said these deficiencies are in no way deal breakers. This is good value for the (admittedly high) asking price. I hope there are plans afoot at Midland to upgrade the Sukhoi book and add other design bureaus like Mil' and Antonov.