But their Foxhound was no match for Eastwood’s Firefox. Before the movie was released, the Soviets began production of a real MiG-31. It was powered by a four-cylinder Volkswagen engine so it could taxi on the runway while turbine fans blew flames out the back of the engine nacelles. A full-size mockup was fabricated out of a radio tower skinned with plywood and foam. “It was a handful to fly,” says Dykstra, a private pilot and RC enthusiast. We went with a chisel-shaped nose and added canards.” Several models were built, including a radio-controlled version. So it had very large engines, which were antithetical to the stealth concept, and a delta wing configuration. But at the same time, he wanted it to have the elements of a kick-ass airplane. So faceted surfaces were an important part of the design. “This was when stealth technology was just becoming public. “Clint had some very specific ideas about what he thought the airplane should look like,” says special visual effects producer John Dykstra. Five years later, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the film version. Thomas upgraded it with telepathic avionics-it could be flown by thought alone-and dubbed it MiG-31. In 1977, Welsh author Craig Thomas published his bestseller Firefox, which featured a fictitious Soviet fighter based on the most advanced MiG at the time, the -25.
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