The lid came off in a 2006 memo from the Secretary of the Air Force: "After decades of secrecy, the Air Force today acknowledged that it flew Communist-built fighters at the Tonopah Test Range northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada." From 1979 through 1988,15,000 classified training sorties initiated the best pilots of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines into a sometimes humbling learning experience: a dogfight with a MiG. Among the best-kept secrets of the late cold war, the project code-named Constant Peg is recounted in America's Secret MiG Squadron, Gaillard Peck's memoir of the Red Eagles of the Air Force 4477th Test and Evaluation Squadron. The Eagles flew mock sorties against U.S. fighter pilots in Soviet-era MiGs with cockpits that still had the original Russian labels. And ground crews wrenched the aircraft without the benefit of English-language manuals.
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