Russian aircraft code names.
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What is MiG-57???
As a general remark.
Arrogant Pentagon strategists who give names to Russian planes while picking their noses sitting in armchairs, seem to have quite a limited vocabulary. All the nicknames they come up with sound like a street slang of guys who hardly finished school.
I recall Tu-22 was once given a reporting name "Beauty" which was found too complimentary and quickly changed to "Blinder".
As a general remark.
Arrogant Pentagon strategists who give names to Russian planes while picking their noses sitting in armchairs, seem to have quite a limited vocabulary. All the nicknames they come up with sound like a street slang of guys who hardly finished school.
I recall Tu-22 was once given a reporting name "Beauty" which was found too complimentary and quickly changed to "Blinder".
David
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What is MiG-57???
As a general remark.
Arrogant Pentagon strategists who give names to Russian planes while picking their noses sitting in armchairs, seem to have quite a limited vocabulary. All the nicknames they come up with sound like a street slang of guys who hardly finished school.
I recall Tu-22 was once given a reporting name "Beauty" which was found too complimentary and quickly changed to "Blinder".
As a general remark.
Arrogant Pentagon strategists who give names to Russian planes while picking their noses sitting in armchairs, seem to have quite a limited vocabulary. All the nicknames they come up with sound like a street slang of guys who hardly finished school.
I recall Tu-22 was once given a reporting name "Beauty" which was found too complimentary and quickly changed to "Blinder".
IIRC they have to be usable across the whole of NATO so there are issues regarding pronunciation - also you have to avoid confusion with other types - both in service and historical...............
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Russsian Aircraft Nicknames
Yes, they had to understandable throughout NATO but also our own. As for pronunciation issues, I remember the HOUND helicopter which fortunately left service before the HIND entered. We mused that the Household Division would have been in a frightful tizz over which Hind they were reporting
Not srategists, just a bunch of Intel folks and not in the Pentagon. Wrong side of the pond.
The most likely venue was a back room somewhere in Mons, or in Paris before that.
Fishbed? Yeah, it's a Fighter. (IIRC, MiG 21)
1. The nicknames were derived for NATO Standardization across 16 nations.
2. Official NATO languages: (UK) English and French.
3. The names had to include phonetic keys, such as F for Fighters and B for Bombers, C for Cargo. (Hence Frogfoot, Backfire, Cub, etc) and so on (with of course a few exceptions) and all helicopters had to start with an H: Helix, Hind, Havoc, Hormone, etc.
4. The NATO phonetic alphabet likewise changed from the original phonetic alphabet that the US Army used in WW II:
The US original version began Able Baker Charlie Dog, Easy, Fox,
the NATO version began Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta, Echo, Foxtrot. (There was a STANAG on that as I recall ... that's in the dusty attic of my memory)
Well, the MiG-15 was originally allocated the reporting name 'Falcon', but this was deemed too laudatory -as I have seen it described by one publication- and it was changed to 'Fagot'. Our friend in Russia may indeed have a point about complimentary names.
Something in the back of my mind says that the names used were given a higher level of classification post Cold War, which is why none were publicly given for Tu204, Mig MFI, S-37 etc, but that could just be my aged grey cells kicking in.
Yes, they had to understandable throughout NATO but also our own. As for pronunciation issues, I remember the HOUND helicopter which fortunately left service before the HIND entered. We mused that the Household Division would have been in a frightful tizz over which Hind they were reporting
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Sure, guys on the bank of the Potomac have other things to do.Aerospaceweb.org | Ask Us - Soviet Aircraft Codenames
I can’t imagine that offending the delicate sensitivities of Russians had anything to do with it. More likely they deliberately chose ugly/dull names to avoid any possibility of confusion with the dynamic/powerful names commonly used by Western operators.
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This sounds implausible, but there may be some truth in it, since during the saga of the RAF”s (non) procurement of the F-111, there is a note to be found in the files at Kew explicitly rejecting Firebolt as a possible name for the type. This was on the grounds that it might be confused over a degraded comms system with FIREBAR, and the principle of avoiding confusion of this sort through the same or easily-misheard names was noted as being a valid one to uphold.
(We ended up choosing ‘Merlin’ as the F-111 name, as the alternative of ‘Harrogate’ was deemed a little uninspiring)
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