Latest MiGs For Hanoi

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31126, 1 August 1966, Page 11

Latest MiGs For Hanoi

fN Z. Press Assn. — Copyright; SAIGON, July 31. The Soviet Union is supplying North Vietnam with several advanced MiG2l aircraft to combat American planes, according to a recent visitor to Hanoi.

At the same time, the visitor said, the near-total failure of Soviet-supplied missiles to bring down American planes is causing the North Vietnamese distress and is their major worry in the air war. This informant could not give the number of MiG2ls delivered recently to bolster North Vietnam's small air force, but said that they were all of the advanced tvpe, rather than the older MiGl7s. No Estimate The MiG2l is considered a reasonable match for the United States F 4 Phantom fighter-bomber. Like the Phantom, the MiG2l can travel at more than twice the speed of sound, it carries missiles and has a higher manoeuvrability than the Phantom. United States Intelligence officers said that they suspected that the North Vietnamese had recently received

more MiG2ls but would not estimate the number. Before the new arrivals, the North Vietnamese air force was believed to have I been reduced to about 60 planes. Of these, 15 were thought to be MiG2ls, about 40 of the older model MiGl7s and MiGlss, and perhaps half a dozen obsolete IL2B bombers. Seventeen MiGs, including three MiG2ls, have been shot down in fights with American planes over North Viet-

nam, as against four United States losses in air-to-air combat. But the biggest headache to the North Vietnamese and their Soviet advisers apparently is the dismal record of the Russian-supplied SA2 sur-face-to-air missile. The North Vietnamese have fired more than 400 of these 36ft long “flying telegraph poles,” and the United States has acknowledged the loss of only about 15 planes to them. Possibly a few more were victims of groundlaunched missiles. United States officials two months ago began a system of announcing plane losses as due to enemy ground fire rather than specifying whether it was conventional anti-aircraft fire or missiles.