The Little World

Look here, Prague. The Russians – crude stumbling peasants that they are…drunken, covered in ice and angst…can make a cockpit tub that fits into the fuselage first time.

The tub is a precise moulding and the partitions that hold it in place allow both sides of the fuselage to approximate without gaps. It’s almost as if the Russians wanted people to have a good time and succeed with the model.

The space under the cockpit tub is sorely needed for weight – thus is a plane that would be a severe tail-sitter otherwise. Not only do you need to place a solid flat bar of lead under the tub, you also need to put a D-shaped weight in the nose behind the air splitter to get it down. The nose piece is painted black to recede from view.

Makes you wonder how the MiG people managed it all – perhaps the weight of the cannon ammunition was the deciding factor for the CG. And what were they like to land when they came back empty, eh?