Foxbat Tales

<p><strong style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)><em>MiG-25 Foxbat: Speed. Altitude. Fear.</em></strong></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>The first time it appeared on radar it didn't make sense.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Too fast. Too high. Too clean. American analysts stared at the data like they had just seen a ghost. Nothing in their inventory could match it. Nothing in their playbooks could explain it. Whatever it was it was Soviet-and it was hunting at the edge of the sky.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>This was the MiG-25.</em></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Born in a rush of ambition and paranoia the MiG-25 wasn't just a fighter. It was 40000 pounds of steel fuel and rage-built to chase American spy planes outrun missiles and outclimb death itself. It was raw metal and violence welded together with one directive-get there first.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>But the MiG-25 wasn't a cold machine. It bled. It fought. It broke bones and rules. In the hands of its pilots it became something more than a myth.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Foxbats tore across the skies during the Yom Kippur War flying so high that Israeli missiles couldn't touch them. They raced across the high steppes of Persia and the deserts of Mesopotamia-sometimes just to take pictures sometimes looking for a fight. During the Gulf War Iraqi MiG-25s defied the odds punching through American air patrols and scoring an upset victory against the superior F-18 Hornet.</span></p><p></p><p><em style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Foxbat Tales</em><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> is the story of the MiG-25 as it was used-in war in chaos in the desperate moments when speed and steel meant the difference between life and death. You'll meet the pilots who pushed the plane past its limits. You'll see how commanders used it as a scalpel one day and a hammer the next. And you'll see it fall flame out rise again.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>This is not just a parochial history. It's the combat record of a machine built for war flown to the edge of the physical realm and remembered in the wreckages radar logs and the stories of those who chased it-and those who never caught it.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(15 17 17 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Strap in. This is the MiG-25.</span></p>