Saturday 24 November 2018

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15bis, Chinese and Albanian users

The Mikoyan-Gurevich was the second jet fighter to serve with the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Air Force (PLAAF), the first one was the MiG-9.
They saw action first, under PLAAF's colours in the Korean war, and, after that conflict, the USSR supplied China with hundreds of them and they received the denomination of Shenyang J-2 for those serving with the PLAAF and Shenyang F-2 for the exported ones, to give the appearance that they were manufactured in China, in spite of having being manufactured abroad, in the USSR.
They played a role in the First Taiwan Strait crisis. After the end of the Korean War, China turned its attention towards Taiwan, as it was controlled by the Kuomintang. Chinese MiG-15bis engaged the outnumbered Chinese Nationalist Air Force (CNAF) and they helped with the occupation of two strategic island groups by the Communists forces in 1954. As the United States was backing the Taiwan government since 1951, the CNAF was equipped with F-86 Sabres since 1955. Therefore, MiG-15bis and F-86 Sabres clashed three years later, in 1958 at the Quemoy crisis, AKA Second Taiwan Strait crisis. Throughout the decade of the 1950s, the PLAAF's MiG-15bis and the CNAF's Sabres kept clashing in spontaneous skirmishes and, during the Quemoy crisis, a CNAF's Sabre achieved the first air-to-air kill with an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile against a MiG-15bis.
The Chinese MiG-15bis were outdated by the MiG-17 which was also locally manufactured under the denomination of Shenyang J-5. Many of the J-2s were sold to Albania, which kept them active under either fighter or advanced trainer role until the early 1990s.











Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-15#Taiwan_Straits_crisis
2. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters

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