- The US has purchased 81 Soviet-era combat aircraft from Kazakhstan, the Kyiv Post reports.
- Kazakhstan, a historic ally of Russia, is engaging more with Western nations.
- The planes could be used for spare parts or deployed as decoys in conflict regions, the Post said.
The US has acquired 81 obsolete Soviet-era combat aircraft from Kazakhstan, the Kyiv Post reported.
Kazakhstan, which is upgrading its air fleet, auctioned off 117 Soviet-era fighter and bomber aircraft, including MiG-31 interceptors, MiG-27 fighter bombers, MiG-29 fighters, and Su-24 bombers from the 1970s and 1980s.
The declared sale value was one billion Kazakhstani tenge, said the Post, or $2.26 million, equalling an average value for each plane of $19,300.
The US purchased 81 of the aged, unusable warplanes, said the Ukrainian Telegram channel Insider UA, per the Post.
The motive behind the US purchase remains undisclosed, said the Post, but it raised the possibility of their use in Ukraine, where similar aircraft are in service.
The article frames them as garbage, but they’re still 4th gen fighters. Same vintage as the F-16 and F-15, and the US still operates tons of those. 4th gen stuff is a whole lot cheaper to run than 5th gen, and that will probably keep 4th gen stuff flying for a long time.
Granted, they’re probably not very well maintained, and the F-16 and F-15 have gotten upgrades over the decades and these probably didn’t. The US doesn’t have spare parts to keep them maintained (except by cannibalizing one plane to keep the other one running), and any weapon hardpoints would need to be adapted to US missiles. There probably isn’t any interesting intelligence to be gained from them anymore. So, yeah, spare parts for Ukraine seems most likely.
To say that the F-16 “got upgrades over the decades” is quite the understatement. A block 1/5/10/15 F-16 would get straight up destroyed by a Block 52 or 60. The airframes may be the same but every major system ON that airframe has seen continuous improvements over the years. Engines upgraded to improve power and reliability, control surface upgrades to improve handling and safety, avionics upgrades to improve flight controls, FoF performance, weapons targeting and on and on. As technology progressed we spent tens of billions keeping the F-16 current.
I highly doubt that Russia or Kazakhstan made those same investments so while those MiGs and SUs are 4th Gen they wouldn’t fare well at all against “Modern” 4th Gen.
Edit: That ignores the upgrades that COULD be put on an F-16 too. There’s at least some of them now flying around with Stealth Coatings and 3D vectoring engine nozzles!
Holy shit, thrust vector nozzle on a 16? I’ve been watching them overhead daily my entire life and the Falcon is still going strong. I’ll just look at the Wikipedia…
”System for Autonomous Control of Simulation (SACS) will be added in order to operate X-62A as a Skyborg”
Oh shit.
The Skyborg has 3d Thrust Vectoring. If you’re on YT you can see a brief video clip of it on “Sandboxx News”. Also Skyborg and it’s SACS, with 3D vectoring, has already flown! :)
Edit: Here’s the link to the video I’m talking about.
Oh it looks awesome and I’m glad to see the frame still being advanced, it’s the quintessential multi role jet. Just hoping skyborg never gets any ideas about skynet