This was arguably the best turbojet engine in the world at that time.
To the shock of many in Russia, the liberal British Labour government willingly agreed to provide all of the design and technical information for the Rolls-Royce Nene turbojet engine along with a license agreement to build it in the Soviet Union. This contrasted with the more prevalent philosophy in the United States and other western powers which stressed having a fewer number of more sophisticated and capable items which came with a much higher price tag.īenefiting from German research on swept wings, Mikoyan and Gurevich incorporated a wing with a 35-degree leading edge sweep into the MiG-15 design, but they turned to the British for the jet engine. This reflected the Soviet military philosophy of the time which emphasized massed numbers of simple, inexpensive, and easy-to-produce equipment. Before production ceased, the MiG-15 would become the most widely produced jet aircraft of all time, with as many as 12,000 built by the Soviet Union and another 6,000 being built by other nations. The term MiG was even used, albeit erroneously, for those fighters produced by other design bureaus like Yakovlev, Sukhoi, and Lavochkin.
But for years to come, the dominance the MiG design bureau enjoyed in producing fighters for the Soviet Union and its client states was so complete that the name MiG became almost synonymous for any Russian fighter aircraft. (The name, MiG, was derived from the first two letters of Mikoyan and the first letter of Gurevich.) The performance of the MiG-15, later given the reporting name Fagot by NATO, was a dramatic surprise to the West, and it was the first jet fighter to be mass produced by MiG. Artem Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich had become the well respected leaders of the Russian MiG design bureau long before United Nations pilots encountered the MiG-15 in the skies over Korea.