TOMCAT vs FOXBAT

Two Superpowers. Two Radical Philosophies. One Stratospheric Duel.

In the tense twilight of the Cold War, the United States Navy and the Soviet Air Defense Forces forged two of the largest, fastest, and most formidable combat aircraft ever flown: the Grumman F-14 Tomcat and the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 Foxbat.

To Western satellite cameras in the late 1960s, the MiG-25 looked like an agile super-fighter capable of out-turning anything in NATO's inventory. But behind closed hangar doors, each machine was built for a completely different kind of warfare.

The F-14 Tomcat was an aerodynamic marvel of variable-geometry sweep wings, the world's first operational microprocessor (the Garrett CADC), and the lethal 100-nautical-mile reach of the AIM-54 Phoenix missile-engineered to protect American supercarrier battle groups from saturation cruise-missile raids.

The MiG-25 Foxbat was an audacious, steel-bodied stratospheric bullet powered by colossal Tumansky R-15 turbojets. Built to counter American Mach 3 bombers and U-2 spyplanes, it could tear across the sky at Mach 2.83 at 70,000 feet, armed with the massive R-40 Acrid missile.

In this meticulously researched, photo-rich historical volume, aviation author Meet Kapuria examines the engineering, radar technology, and real-world combat records of these two Cold War icons:

• The VFX Breakthrough: How the disastrous failure of the naval F-111B led Grumman to pioneer electron-beam titanium welding and automatic wing-sweep schedules
• The Stainless Steel Phantom: How Soviet engineers conquered 300°C aerodynamic heating with nickel-steel alloys and 600-kilowatt vacuum-tube radar.
• The Belenko Defection: The true inside story of September 6, 1976, when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko landed his top-secret MiG-25 in Hakodate, Japan, exposing its secrets to Western intelligence
• Gulf of Sidra Shootdowns: Detailed gun-camera reconstructions of the 1981 and 1989 aerial engagements against Libyan Su-22 Fitters and MiG-23 Floggers.
• Iran's Secret Aces: The unvarnished combat history of Iranian F-14s during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, including the verified victories of Brigadier General Jalil Zandi.
• Desert Storm & Beyond: The January 17, 1991 shootdown of Scott Speicher's F/A-18C Hornet by an Iraqi MiG-25, and history's first drone dogfight in 2002.

Featuring 60 authentic archival photographs, declassified CIA intelligence files, 300-DPI technical blueprints, and operational maps, TOMCAT vs FOXBAT delivers the definitive, historically grounded account of two machines that pushed military aviation to the outer limits of speed, altitude, and firepower.