"Firefox" Cold War spectacle starring Eastwood and Academy Award-winning staff

Lieutenant Belenko defection incident

The incident in which Soviet Lieutenant Belenko defected to Hakodate in a MiG-25 was shocking, but this movie depicts an even more shocking operation in which an American pilot steals a fictitious new Soviet aircraft, the Mig-31 Firefox, and takes off. is drawn. It is said that the original author, Craig Thomas, wrote the original novel based on the defection incident of Lieutenant Belenko that occurred during the Cold War, and when the book was released in the United States in 1977, Lieutenant Belenko It is said that the first edition, an unprecedented 230,000 copies, was published using the asylum incident as promotional material.

Lieutenant Belenko's defection incident occurred on the afternoon of September 6, 1976. In Hokkaido, one of the Soviet Union's mysterious new MIG-25 planes makes a forced landing at Hakodate Airport in Hakodate City. The pilot was Lieutenant Belenko Victor Ivanovich, who had flown from the Chuguevka base, and was on his way to defect to the United States when his plane ran out of fuel, so he was forced to land at Hakodate Airport. This incident exposed Japan's ``weakness in the skies'' against low-altitude intrusions and pointed out the laxity of its exclusive defense system, but Lieutenant Belenko was quickly granted asylum in the United States, and a few days after the incident, he returned to the U.S. is stepping on the ground. In any case, the Western countries at the time immediately conducted an investigation of the Soviet Union's phantom MIG-25, which was seen as a threat. Let's omit it here.

"Firefox" © 1982 Warner Bros. entertainment inc. All rights reserved.

The Soviet Union's new, fictional MiG-31 (different from the actual MiG-31 "Foxhound") that appears in the movie is the main character of the film, which is secretly being developed by the Soviet Union, and is set to be the successor to the MiG-25. . It is a cutting-edge aircraft that has no similar aircraft anywhere in the Western world, with a maximum speed of Mach 6, stealth performance with an anti-radar system, and above all, a thought control system. It has an amazing performance in that the aircraft can automatically operate and fight by simply issuing commands in the pilot's head, and even if Western countries tried to develop a fighter aircraft comparable to this, , it will take more than ten years. Lieutenant Belenko is also a surprisingly high-performance machine. The main plot of this work is to steal this.

By the way, a total of nine MIG-31 models were created for the movie. John Dykstra's team created four large models, four small models, and one full-size model with built-in precision equipment, and used them to suit different scenes in the movie. In addition, two of the four large models have the ability to actually fly, and the special effects scenes that were created using them look cheap today, but considering the film technology of the time, I can see how difficult the expression was.