War Machines Drawn: Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17F, part nine, African users, part three

Tuesday 27 August 2019

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17F, part nine, African users, part three

As we've said many times before, the MiG-17F was the fighter backbone of many African nations, among them the following ones:

Mozambique: Just like it happened with Angola, People's Liberation Air Force of Mozambique (PLAFM) was created in 1975 after Independence War and the subsequent Civil War. Twelve MiG-17Fs were supplied to the PLAFM most of them to perform ground support missions as they didn't have to keep the skies clear. Many of them were ex-East German which were already modified for fighter-bomber operations and had already underwing pylons for carry either bombs or air-to-ground rocket launchers.
The fighter-bombers were delivered to the port of Beira in August 1981 with a detachment of East-German pilots and technicians to put the aircraft together and test-flight them. In fact, the first test flight took place in Beira on 9th September 1981 at the hands of an East German pilot. By October it was officially accepted into the PLAFM. There are reports about additional shipping of two 12-plane batches in 1983 and 1984 but they were never confirmed. During the whole duration of the Mozambican Civil War, the MiG-17F were flown by two fighter-bomber squadrons based at Maputo Air Base and it's known that all of them were inoperative by the early 1990s.
Nigeria: The MiG-17 first and the MiG-17F second, gave the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) combat capability after a Biafran attack on 13th August 1967 that damaged the already weakened NAF. After that attack, the USSR supplied the Nigerian Air Force with deliveries taken from Egyptian ports to Kano IAP. Initially just 8 MiG-17F were delivered. In July 1971 it was estimated that all of them were still active. They were taken out of service in 1975 following the delivery of the MiG-21 which replaced them.
Uganda: From 1966 until 1972 around 12 MiG-17Fs were supplied to Uganda, whose Air Force (from now on Ugandan Army Air Force - UAAF) was strongly influenced by the Israeli Air Force back then, hence that atypical camouflage configuration. At least four of them were destroyed in the Entebbe Raid in 1977 and the last ones were flown during the Uganda-Tanzania War in 1978 and 1979. One of them was shot down by Tanzanian SA-7 on 11th October 1978 and the remaining ones (just two or three) captured and destroyed by Tanzanian troops in April 1979.