Meet the MiG 1.44 Fighter That Failed for Russia: In the 1982 techno-thriller “Firefox,” the main character, played by Clint Eastwood, is secretly inserted into the USSR with a false identity in an intelligence operation. His assignment: steal the latest high-technology Soviet fighter aircraft, fly it out of the country, and deliver it to the West.
The storyline was unbelievable. The characteristics ascribed to the aircraft at the beginning of the film were pure science fiction. The designator given to the fictional fighter design was “MiG-31,” but it looked nothing like the real fighter produced by Mikoyan with that same name, which was revealed not long after.
The aircraft in the film did resemble another Mikoyan design that was initially heard about only in rumors in the very late 1980s. That fighter became known as the Multifunction Frontline Fighter.
MiG 1.44 Fighter: Mission and Moscow’s Once Military Might
A colleague in Moscow once summed up the problems with the MFI very simply. “This was a design conceived entirely for the Cold War. Every rivet in its airframe was made for a mission that no longer existed. It was an aircraft that had no place in the armed forces of the new Russia. Most of all, even if there was a use for it there was no money to see it through to production.”
The MFI, which became known by its design bureau moniker of Project 1.42/1.44 (called the MiG 1.44 in many defense circles), was born out of a 1980s-conceived concept. It was a plan to develop an aircraft that would present a technological challenge to the US developments of the advanced F-15 variants, the F-22, and the Eurofighter Typhoon.
This created a requirement for an aircraft that, by 1990, proved outsized, too demanding for the industry to deliver on given the aerospace industrial technology of the day, and very expensive. Given the dire economic situation of the Soviet Union’s sunset years, there was also no realistic scenario for the aircraft to ever enter series production.
Those economic constraints carry on to this day. Russia’s current next-generation fighter aircraft, the Sukhoi Su-57, is seemingly a logical evolution of the original 1980s Su-27 and not a “clean sheet” design. It is also estimated to be half the price per unit of what the MFI would have cost to produce in today’s dollars.
A 2023 comparison of the two aircraft explains the gulf between them, with the Su-57 representing “a program developed for the fleet of a Russian state which was well below the ranks of the world’s top five economies and was no longer among the two leaders in key emerging combat aviation-related technologies.”
“The MiG 1.42 by contrast was developed for the Soviet Union, which was world’s second largest economy and had one of the two best funded air forces in the world. The end of the MiG 1.42 program marked a turning point in Russian aviation history after which, having competed on a peer level to the United States from the Stalinist era in the late 1940s, it effectively ceded the fifth-generation [fighter] race.”
Technological Dreams
However, the economic impossibility of producing the MFI did not cause the Mikoyan design team to give up on the project. In the early 1990s, when the idea of the aircraft becoming a license-produced program was no longer a possibility, there were still plans to continue the development into the prototype phase until the design was fully validated.
The director of the consolidated MiG-MAPO aircraft-building consortium, Anatoliy Manuyev, said the objective was to “use the aircraft as a ‘locomotive of technology.’ By developing and maturing all the systems to be installed in the aircraft the Russian military aircraft industry overall would benefit.”
The MFI design included new engines, radars, materials, flight controls, and other technologies. Some of those technologies were finally validated, although some were already obsolete concepts by the time the aircraft was ready for its first flight.
On a cold morning in late February 2000, the MFI finally flew from the top-secret Flight Research Institute (LII) in the city of Zhukovskiy. This initial flight was nine years behind schedule and took place only two months after the current Russian President, Vladimir Putin, took office.
The flight would symbolize what became the Putin era pantomime of “proving how Russia is still a world power.” Attempting to live off the glory of the bygone Soviet era and pretending this is an achievement on par with putting the first man in space. Using demonstrations of aging military hardware to pretend to appear modern.
All the while, Russians were talking about how “this great achievement will allow us to shoot ahead of the Americans and become number one again.”
But competing with the US on a peer level was over some years ago. Like the people who kept developing the MFI long after it was a dead program, Putin keeps pretending the race is real.
About the Author:
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
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