I've been watching these documentaries lately, basically the entire history of Russian/Soviet aviation, complete with not so great translation and heavily accented Russian narator!

I'm really enjoying them, the footage especially is hugely interesting for me and hearing the story of Russian aviation from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Some of the commentary is shall we say, rather biased towards Russia (I had a sly grin when they talked about how impressed the Western engineers were when they got their hands on Belenko's MiG-25, and it contradicts itself when the narrator concedes that the F-86 was a better combat fighter than the MiG-15 but then goes on to state the MiG-15 was the world's best fighter, surpsisingly they make mention of the Allied Lend-Lease fighters, as well as how the Soviets used British jet engines to get off the starting blocks... I don't think I've ever seen an American documentary that acknowledged the British contribution to American jet engine development), but then again after watching Discovery and History channel documentaries for years I'm used to watching stuff that's heavily biased towards America and the American version of aviation history.

I became interested in Russian/Soviet aviation after getting heavily into Su-27 Flanker (remember that sim?) back in the day. So far this series is filling in lots of gaps in my knowledge.

I just wish somebody would do a similar series telling the story of British aviation.

Right now I've watched the first four episodes on fighters and skipped ahead to the later episode on Cold War bombers. I'll be watching the rest as I get the time...











<- Before anyone says yes I know it's a British soldier and a Rapier missile system!