“It’s like two professional athletes looking for the edge,” says Colonel Ralph Wetterhahn, now retired from the U.S. Air Force. He’s describing how fighter pilot measure one another and their aircrafts and, as a former fighter pilot and crash site investigator, he should know. Standing outside, his eyes squinting against the sun, Wetterhahn brings a standard sort of authority to Nova’s Missing in MiG Alley: he’s been there, which makes his testimony unassailable.
Other interviewees similarly underscore the documentary’s focus on “the world’s first jet war.” Former U.S. F-86 Sabre pilots recall fighting MiG-15 pilots, alternately inexperienced Koreans and veteran Soviets. Their national affiliations were key to the way the Korean War stood in for the Cold War As the documentary reports, the U.S. pilots knew their opponents were Russian, but kept the secret—apparently under orders—in order that the American population would not know. Otherwise, citizens might rise up and “demand action” against the Russians, who by then had developed an atomic bomb. “To avoid WWIII,” the two sides agreed to lie about how they conducted the war.
The more precise benefits of this lie—and who enjoyed them—are questions left unasked in Missing in MiG Alley, which instead lays out an array of mostly superficial stories. Primarily, the documentary extols the pilots’ skills and dogfighty grit (the “better trained” Sabre pilots included some who “went on to be astronauts, like Buzz Aldrin,” who appears in scratchy, stalwart-young-Buzz footage remembering the mission when “I got my first MiG destroyed"), as well as their courage in the face of physical hardships. The program spends some time explaining how gravity affects humans in speeding cockpits, and the advantages of G-suits: since Sabre pilots were advised to dive fast in order to escape MiGs, they were at regular risk of “blacking out.”
The jets used different technologies (the MiGs had advanced Rolls-Royce engines, courtesy of the British, who cut deals with their new buddies the Russians following WWII; the Sabres were based on Nazi designs, with swept wings), and the documentary emphasizes the efforts of both sides to get hold of the other’s covert equipment. To this end, the Russians were especially eager to get actual jets. So they shot down as many as they could, hoping some would come to ground in legible form.
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