Viktor Belenko was a Russian interceptor pilot, who in 1976 flew his MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor to Japan and defected to the United States. The delivery of the plane was an intelligence windfall for the West, and Belenko's choice to flee the USSR despite the privileges theoretically accorded to Soviet pilots was a propaganda coup for the United States.
Viktor Belenko was born on February 15, 1947. As a youth, Belenko was clearly intelligent and motivated to learn and experience as much as he could. His father, a soldier in World War II, and later a miner and factory worker, encouraged Viktor's education, in the hopes that his son would have a better life.
He was a voracious reader, and his interest in flying was largely kindled by a sympathetic librarian introducing him to the books of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who, while best known as the author of The Little Prince, was also a pioneering aircraft pilot and engineer. In addition, Viktor also read adventure stories such as Huckleberry Finn and 20000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Following his basic education, Belenko joined the DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Assistance to the Army, Air Force, and Navy), which he thought would be the best route to the Soviet air force. He was assigned to factory work, taking flight training classes at night. His first flight instructor was one of very few female pilots in the DOSAAF. While Belenko was initially resentful at the prospect of having to learn from a woman, she immediately demonstrated enough aerobatic ability (read: scared him half to death) for him to accept her authority. While he enjoyed the flight training, he was frustrated by the requirement to spend about a third of his class time in political indoctrination classes, and by the annual suspension of classes to help with the harvest at nearby kolkhozes (collective farms).
When he got into the Air Force in 1970, Belenko was quickly assigned as an instructor, training new pilots in the MiG-17. This was a frustrating position for him; he was politically pressured to graduate pilots who he felt were unready, and to meet quotas of trainee flight time, he was forced to fabricate flight logs when, for example, weather made it impossible to fly, dumping precious jet fuel on the ground to account for the fuel that would have been used on those flights. As an instructor, Belenko was also expected to spend a lot of time exposing his students to political propaganda, which he (privately) considered a waste of time. And while the obsolete MiG-17 was considered fun to fly, he was much more interested in the newer, more exciting planes flown by front-line units, such as the MiG-25.
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