MiG-29 Flight in Russia (Customer review)

Flying a supersonic MiG-29 jet fighter or another similar military aircraft has always been the dream of my life. My wife knew that and bought me a voucher for a Fulcrum MiG-29 flight from an experience gift company. This was surely the best gift I ever received.
 

The MiG-29 flight was organized by a specialized jet fighter flight company, MiGFlug. The Top-Service they offer are MiG 29 flights in Russia, and Zero G flights in Russia and the US. Next to that, they have many smaller, price worthy jet trainers they operate nearly everywhere. But I was lucky to receive the rather expensive MiG-29 flight in Russia, so we went to prepare. MiGFlug has been very professional and helped us a lot with visa etc. We felt very comfortable with them.

The day we arrived at the Sokol plant in Nizhniy Novgorod I was rather nervous. My wife Lucy tried to call me down a bit, but I guess she was also a little bit nervous herself.
 

After entering the airbase together with our nice interpreter (interpreter service and driver where included in the package), we were welcomed by the Sokol staff. It felt like in the Sowjet Union on the airbase. Everything is very old, even the staff seems to come from the USSR. But they are nice, just old-fashioned.
 

After checking the blood pressure (it was far higher than normal), I got dressed up in a G-Suit and my flight overall. Now I was ready for the MiG flight. My pilot Sergey welcomed me and guided me into the Sokol MiG Factory briefing room.
 

After discussing the MiG flight program, we went to the MiG-29 jet fighter aircraft, and now I really felt my heart beating. It was bigger than I had expected. Sergey explained me some technical details when we went around the aircraft. This helped to calm me down a little bit.
 

Then I was told to climb into the cockpit with an old orange ladder. I had to get ready for the MiG-29 flight. The engines are not that noisy inside, but my wife said afterwards that she felt her head will explode as Sergey started the engine.
 

After taxiing at rather high speed for a mile, we finally made it to the runway. Now the engines even became louder. Full power. You could feel that the brakes had troubles holding the MiG aircraft back. It started to shake. Then I was pressed into my seat with a huge power. I could hardly breathe the first seconds. We accelerated and took off so fast, it was simply incredible!
 

As I thought I can breathe now a bit before it starts Sergey already took the nose up to climb towards the Sky, and I felt about 6 Gs. That’s so much I didn’t see anything! It just gets black.
 

Than we gained so much altitude that we were in the stratosphere within a minute or so. The look is so beautiful! And you can see the curvature of our planet. I enjoyed it so much. Very romantic, somehow, even though you sit in a MiG fighter aircraft, the beast of the Cold War we always feared!
 

A crazy flight program with everything you can imagine followed: Loopings, Rolls, and some more manouvres. And I was able to fly the MiG myself! Fly MiG is not as hard as you probably think. But it is so funny. Somehow I would like to go again and have some more stick time.
 

After landing I was totally exhausted. The G load I got was hard. I was happy that I didn’t have to drive, our driver brought us back to the hotel in the town of Nizhniy Novgorod, where I first went to bed for some two hours. I lay there with a big smile on my face, remembering my MiG flight on Sokol Airbase.