Pilot used his MIG jet fighter to defect from North Korea to US airbase
, 2023-01-09 04:55:07,
He parked amid a cluster of American warplanes, tore a framed photograph of Kim Il-sung from his instrument panel, jumped out of his cockpit and threw the picture to the ground.
And then, as he remembered it, “all hell broke loose around the air base”. Dozens of airmen scrambled to reach him, and the commander of the Fifth Air Force, Lieutenant General Samuel E. Anderson, rushed to the base.
“Nobody seemed to know what to do,” Rowe recalled. “I shouted ‘Motorcar, motorcar, motorcar’, which was about the only English I remembered from high school, hoping that someone would bring an automobile to drive me to headquarters.”
This is the MIG15 communist jet fighter which was brought down on Kimpo airport near Seoul by Lieutenant No Kum-Sok and turned over to UN forces. Credit:AP
Two pilots put him into a jeep, told him to turn over his semiautomatic pistol, which he gladly did, and brought him to a building for interrogation. The incident became a major news story.
“Red Lands MIG Near Seoul and Surrenders to the Allies,” The New York Times reported in a Page 1 headline.
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Seeking to determine the MIG’s strengths and weaknesses in anticipation of future conflicts with the Soviet Union and its allies, the Air Force dispatched some of its most accomplished test pilots – including Major Chuck Yeager, who had gained fame in 1947 as the first flier to break the sound barrier – to put the MIG-15 through strenuous manoeuvres. Their verdict: The F-86 was the…
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