Air and Space Magazine, October, 1995

  The pilots in Fighter Wing 73 used to fly on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Now they fly in the same squadron. Originally published in Air and Space magazine in 1995 and written by Steve Vogel.

Along the Baltic plain in northern Germany, a sleek, gray needle-nose jet roars down a long runway ringed by forest and screeches into the cold blue sky. Once a top-of-the-line interceptor for the Soviet Union and its satellites, this MiG-29 now belongs to Fighter Wing 73, a curious amalgamation of pilots who speak the same language, wear the same gray flightsuits, and patrol the same skies but, until a few years ago, were sworn enemies. While half of the squadron's 28 pilots once patrolled West German skies in Tornados and Phantoms, the rest flew on the other side of the Iron Curtain as members of the East German air force.

With the cold war a half-decade dead, it is perhaps no great shock to find MiGs under the control of North American Treaty Organization members. Yet after the German reunification in 1990, many in the Luftwaffe wanted nothing to do with the MiGs, their pilots, or any other remnant of East Germany's air force. Part of that attitude stemmed from a disdain for the enemy. Part of it was concern about the interoperability of two vastly different military systems. And part of it was economic: With the cold war over, Germany was drastically cutting, not increasing, its forces.

Indeed, the East German military has been disbanded and much of its equipment scrapped or sold to countries like Turkey or Indonesia. Other than a few transports and helicopters, the Luftwaffe retained only one type of East German aircraft: the MiG-29. Though the Fulcrum--its NATO code name--was one of the most feared weapons in the Warsaw Pact arsenal during the waning years of the cold war, many in the Luftwaffe scoffed at the notion that the aging Soviet jet could compare to newer and electronically superior western fighters.

But the Luftwaffe remains heavily dependent on 25-year-old Vietnam-era F-4 Phantoms, and the more enlightened among the Bundeswehr, the West German military, realized it might not be such a bad idea to add the MiGs to its arsenal, especially considering that efforts to develop and build a European fighter have run into endless political and financial problems. The Luftwaffe's MiGs are projected to stay in service until 2005. Some in the Bundeswehr, however, worry that with the recent acquisition of the MiGs, Germany may not feel the need to participate in the development of the new European fighter, which the Luftwaffe continues to insist it requires.

Adding the MiGs was also a bit of a sop to the East Germans, a gesture to show that despite all evidence to the contrary, the Federal Republic of Germany had not simply swallowed the German Democratic Republic and spit out the remains. The result has been something of a social experiment--a bright, shining, and rare example of an enterprise in which Wessis (West Germans) and Ossis (East Germans) do not constantly carp at each other and mutter that maybe the Berlin Wall was not such a bad idea after all.

Fighter Wing 73 is based at Laage, an air base built by East Germany in 1984 as home to two squadrons of Su-22 fighter-bombers. Ninety miles north of Berlin, the enormous base covers 3,000 acres amid farmland in the gently rolling, often rainy and foggy plains of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.

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It's located in what is by far the most rural German state, one of the few places in the nation where a drive in the countryside does not find every square inch of territory put to maddeningly efficient use. Woods, mostly pine, cover so much of the base that it has its own forester. Every six months or so, the base organizes a hunt, and local sportsmen blast away at wild boars in an effort to keep the runways clear of the beasts.

Laage is a new home for Fighter Wing 73, which was originally stationed at Preschen but moved last winter to avoid local flying restrictions and the Polish border. The closest city of any size is Rostock, an old Hanseatic League Baltic port about 15 miles away. The city made international headlines in August 1992, when bands of skinheads launched nightly attacks on a refugee hostel as local citizens cheered and police stood by. The MiGs have brought promise of some 300 jobs to this region still reeling from the closing of shipyards that were unable to compete after reunification. Unemployment in the area is a grim 18 percent.

Leftover symbols of its East German heritage are still very much in evidence at Laage. A Trabi, one of the oddly dependable little plastic cars once prevalent in East Germany, still provides occasional transportation around the base. Construction and renovation projects evince Luftwaffe attempts to raise Laage to western standards. On a bright, blustery day last December, even the pilots were hard at work scraping paint in the squadron operations room. There's little they can do, however, about the astoundingly ugly concrete buildings they've inherited.

It's generally not difficult for a visitor at Laage to guess whether a pilot is an Ossi or a Wessi. The westerners have broader smiles (and better teeth), louder laughs, and a bit more swagger. Considering what the eastern pilots have had to endure following reunification, the absence of swagger is no surprise. Former East German MiG pilots who wanted to join the Luftwaffe were given a take-it-or-leave-it offer that included a reduction in rank--in some cases, a drop of two levels (a standard policy toward East Germans joining the West German military). They were also required to undergo intensive study of English, the language of NATO. In addition, they would be educated in the ways of western democracies.

Of 47 East German MiG-29 pilots, 42 agreed to these one-sided terms for the same reason pilots everywhere would: They wanted to keep flying. "It wasn't a difficult decision. I've always been a fighter pilot," says Lieutenant Colonel Guenter Fichte. "It wasn't important what rank, but what job."

Lieutenant Andreas Zube, 31, a short and serious-minded Berliner, confesses to having had initial misgivings about joining the Luftwaffe. "In the beginning there was a lot of hesitation from our side as well as from those guys," he says, referring to the westerners. Zube had joined the East German air force in 1981 because he wanted to fly. "In East Germany it was the only way to become a pilot," he says. As an East German pilot, Zube viewed the men he flies with now as the enemy.

Asked whether he viewed the NATO alliance as a serious threat, he replies: "Yes, of course. That was what we were taught and what we believed. It was also a matter of motivation. Otherwise we wouldn't have taken our states of readiness seriously." East German pilots had to be ready within minutes to go airborne 365 days a year. In contrast, the West German military was virtually closed by 2 p.m. on Friday afternoons, even during the most frigid periods of the cold war.

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