Issue No 21 THE AVIATION HISTORIAN 63
strategy did not necessarily bring about the
desired results.
The most tangible result of the air campaign up
to that point was the increasing effectiveness of
the North Vietnamese air-defence system, which
by this time was enjoying greatly improved
co-ordination between MiG and SAM/AAA
operations. The VPAF began to deploy its first
MiG-21Fs (Nato reporting name Fishbed-C)
in November 1965 — with more advanced
MiG-21PF Fishbed-Ds arriving in April 1966 —
in a new fighter regiment manned by 33 pilots
under the command of Maj Tran Manh, with Capt
Dinh Ton as Operations Officer. The decision to
set up the new unit had been taken in the spring
of 1965, when 12 MiG-17 pilots and 24 newly
graduated cadets were sent to Krasnodar in the
southern Soviet Union for conversion to the
MiG-21. Three of the pilots were “washed out”,
however, and were reassigned to the MiG-17.
Enter the fishbed
The unit chosen to operate the new supersonic
fighter was the 921st Fighter Regiment (FR),
named Sao Do (Red Star), the first and at that time
only VPAF fighter unit, which transferred its MiG-
17s to the newly created 923rd FR. Only a small
cadre of experienced personnel stayed with the
921st FR to help with conversion on to the MiG-21.
The VPAF’s fighter force commander, Lt-Col Dao
Dinh Luyen, thoroughly trained his men on
the new aircraft and set about devising suitable
tactics for using it. Owing to the inexperience
of most of his pilots, he wisely decided to begin
with a period of “on the job” training, simulating
attacks on American formations and assessing
their results. Accordingly, American airmen
began to report sighting elusive MiG-21s making
passes but breaking off quickly, as if they were on
a training cycle, trying to improve their technique.
The next stage was to attack Ryan Firebee
drones used for surveillance and as SAM-bait, and
attempts were also made to intercept high-flying
Lockheed U-2s. These tactics seemed desultory at
first, but the Americans were expecting the North
Vietnamese MiG-21s to engage soon, and took
such a threat very seriously.
The type’s first combat occurred on April 26,
1966, when a USAF McDonnell Douglas F-4
Phantom II shot down a VPAF MiG-21. Initially,
the VPAF combined mixed formations of MiG-
17s and MiG-21s in low-level dogfights with
haphazard results, the American fighters usually
having the upper hand. The MiG-21 proved toThe Vietnam People’s Air Force received its first Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21F
Fishbed-Cs in November 1965. This example of the 921st Fighter Regiment
is seen at Noi Bai armed with a pair of Soviet-designed R-3S (AA-2 Atoll)
infrared short-range air-to-air missiles, essentially a reverse-engineered
version of the American AIM-9 Sidewinder.The commander of the
VPAF in January 1967
was Lt-Col Dao Dinh
Luyen, a former infantry
officer and one of the
first North Vietnamese
fighter pilots to be
trained in China in
the late 1950s.ALBERT GRANDOLINI COLLECTIONALBERT GRANDOLINI COLLECTION