Originally Posted by
Bevo
Well he is laying it on a bit thick. A certain “agency” provided flight manuals and maintenance manuals translated into English.
I get the impression that the flight and tech manuals were indeed very sparse in the beginning of the project and weren't really an emphasis item until Lt. Hugh Brown's fatal crash in 1979. After that mishap Col. Gail Peck was relieved as CO and the outfit was 'brought up to Air Force standards' in documentation and demeanor.
Here's more on the claims of little initial MiG documentation in excerpts from Col. Gail Peck's
America's Secret MiG Squadron: The Red Eagles of Project CONSTANT PEG:
Initially, there were no real documents or flight manuals. We learned from other pilots that had flown the jets and by asking questions like, “What should I do in terms of an emergency procedure if this or that happens.” I am told that eventually flight manuals were written, but I have never seen them. Hopefully they will turn up and be put on display at the National Museum of the Air Force alongside other memorabilia from CONSTANT PEG.
So, just like the pilots, crew chiefs had to learn an aircraft unfamiliar to any of them. Even less so than the pilots, as maintenance manuals were almost absent and training, necessarily incomplete and informal, gave each individual nowhere near enough clues as to what his jet would do next. Couple this with a randomly available parts stock and you get a small idea of the weight of responsibility on the shoulders of the ones who strapped in our pilots. Imagine the feeling if their pilot didn’t come back.
They took old MiGs and turned them into airworthy aircraft. Everything in the cockpit was in Russian, the few manuals we had were in Russian and many parts were not available and had to be made from scratch. What they did was miraculous. I stand in awe of them.
The MiGs we flew came from another land. They were junk, scrap, wrecks, and derelicts when we got them, having been sat in a swamp or a desert and left to rot. We brought them back, and without any tech manuals they were fully restored after many months of hard work by the crew chiefs with the guidance of Bobby Ellis.
In the early 1980s the Red Eagles dealt with an office in the CIA that supplied us with technical manuals. Our CIA contacts were more on the operational side of the agency rather than the analytical side.
From Steve Davies'
Red Eagles: Americas Secret MiGs:
“Trying to fly airplanes that had no original parts, no markings in the cockpit that you could read, no flight manual of how you could fly them” was tough, Oberle recalled. “We had to go through and teach ourselves all of this stuff.” There were some switches that they didn’t have to know – such as those of the SIRENA radar warning system that alerted the MiG pilot when he was being swept or tracked by an enemy radar, but for the most part it was in their best interests to know the aircraft as thoroughly as possible.
Geographically separated from Frick and the others for the time being, Morgenfeld worked on aspects of the program that required little interaction with the others. One such task was the creation of documentation, and in particular the creation of the first of many iterations of a flight manual for the MiG-21. As a template, he used an original, but “crude,” MiG-21 flight manual that had been translated into English by the Soviets for one of their customers. His focus was less on creating a document that would provide a complete step-by-step guide to flying and operating the MiG-21 – although the manual duly noted every switch in the cockpit and its function – and more about using his test pilot training to verify precisely “the basic numbers” of take-off, landing, and performance so that the MiG could be flown safely.