Afghan Air Force MiG-21 control column

[MattS]

It's good to have friends. I got a call from an old friend of mine back in 2004 who usually calls me in the middle of the night from places like Ho Chi Minh City, Bogota, or Berlin. He's an intel officer and I don't ask too many questions. The conversation that night was between me in Indiana and him somewhere in Afghanistan. He was talking about some Afghan Air Force aircraft they had found on Shindand Airfield in Herat Province. He was describing what I took to be MiG-21s or Su-17 Fitters and said they looked to be almost operational except "one was missing its control stick. Be looking for a package." A week later I got a box with this inside. I mounted it on a piece of wood next to his information and photo in my room. The picture is of the aircraft as they appeared in 2004, but a quick google search shows they have been scrapped since.

[VMI88]

Very cool! When I passed through Bagram in 2003 there was a boneyard full of ex-Afghan Air Force planes. We were told to stay off of them because of the potential for mines but I also heard they had been picked pretty clean by this point. When I was stationed there in 2006 they were gone.