Production of the MiG was too late for use in that conflict and was first used in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis in While the MiG was designed to shoot down slower American bombers, it showed surprising success when used by North Vietnamese pilots to combat American fighters and fighter-bombers during the Vietnam War , nearly a decade after its initial design.
This was due to the MiG being more agile and maneuverable than the American F-4 Phantom and F Thunderchief , which were focused on speed and long range combat, as well as the fact that MiG was armed with guns, which initial models of the F-4 Phantom lacked. While the MiGbis introduced swept wings to air combat over Korea, the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau had already begun work on its replacement in originally the MiGbis45 in order to fix any problems found with the MiG in combat.
The design would ultimately still prove effective into the s when pressed into subsonic dogfights over Vietnam against much faster planes that were not optimized for maneuvering in such slower speed, short-range engagements.
While the MiG used a Mach sensor to deploy airbrakes because it could not safely exceed Mach 0. Later MiGs would be the first Soviet fighter application of an afterburner , which burned extra fuel in the exhaust of the basic engine to give extra thrust at a high efficiency cost. Though the MiG looks very similar to the MiG, it had a new thinner and more highly swept wing and tailplane for speeds approaching Mach 1. While the F introduced the "all-flying" tailplane , which made the aircraft more controllable near the speed of sound, this feature would not be adopted on MiG aircraft until the fully supersonic MiG Other easily visible differences to its predecessor were the addition of a third wing fence on each wing, the addition of a ventral fin and a longer and less tapered rear fuselage that added about one meter in length.
The MiG shared the same Klimov VK-1 engine, and much of the rest of its construction such as the forward fuselage, landing gear and gun installation was carried over. In the midst of testing, pilot Ivan Ivashchenko was killed when his aircraft developed flutter, which tore off his horizontal tail, causing a spin and crash on 17 March Lack of wing stiffness also resulted in aileron reversal which was discovered and fixed.
