Flying Russia’s Blue Yonder : Military: Test pilot instructors from Edwards Air Base visit counterparts near Moscow and try out their craft. ‘They were just like us,’ a U.S. aviator says.

Lt. Col. Wayne Denesik grew up dreaming about the Soviet Union’s famed fighter jet--the MIG-29.

About a week ago he did what he once believed could never happen--Denesik flew a MIG-29, in the former Soviet Union.

“I was sitting in the MIG-29 thinking, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” Denesik said.

An interceptor that flies at Mach 2.3, the aircraft was shown in the West for the first time in 1988, and flown for the first time by an American, Benjamin S. Lambeth, an expert on Soviet military affairs, in late 1989.

Denesik is one of five instructors from the U.S. Air Force’s test pilot school, located at Edwards Air Force Base, who traveled to Russia’s Gromov Flight Research Installation in Zhukovsky, about 30 miles southeast of Moscow. They were part of an information exchange in the first such visit of American test pilots to the country, which only a decade ago was described as the Evil Empire.

Lt. Col. Steve Henry, deputy commander of the test pilot school, described it as “looking in a mirror. They were just like us.”

Over the last several years, the visits of Russian and U.S. military representatives have become increasingly common, according to a Pentagon spokesman.

Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, set the precedent for the reciprocal trips in 1989 with a series of face-to-face meetings with his Russian counterpart, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev.

Since those first encounters between top officials of the two superpowers, hundreds of visits have occurred between the nation’s fighting forces, an Air Force spokesman said. Military band members from the two nations have performed together since the end of the Cold War.

For the instructors at the Air Force’s only test pilot school who visited the Russian counterpart, the experience was a first. They expect to be part of another first in September, when a five-member contingent from the test pilot school in Russia comes to Edwards Air Force Base.

“For years we’ve been having exchanges with other (nation’s) test pilot schools,” said Lt. Col. Randy Neville, flying qualities branch chief at the school. “We felt the political climate was right to do it with Russia.”

The trip, from which the Edwards flyers returned July 4, took months of planning.

Test pilots are used to trying new things. But they said the experience in Russia is something they won’t easily forget.

What quickly became apparent was that the Russians were more like the visiting American servicemen than different, said Col. Harry Strittmatter, commander of the Air Force test pilot school with 22 years in the Air Force.

“Every night I’d have to go to bed and pinch myself,” he said. “I’d say, ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’ ”

During their week together, they talked about the air raid sirens of the 1950s, Strittmatter said. Like the Americans, the Russians remember the drills at school, and neighbors building bomb shelters.

“They were convinced we were going to attack them, like we were convinced they were going to attack us,” said Lt. Col. Gary Aldrich, the only one of the five who had been to Russia before the visit last week.

“We became very close in a very short time,” Strittmatter said.

Aldrich added, “We all have this flight test thing in common.”

But there were also differences. The Gromov Flight Research Installation is in a town that never appeared on Soviet maps. And the people in Zhukovsky are trained in the field of aviation from “cradle to grave,” Neville said. Test pilots are even buried in the same cemetery near the installation.

The American pilots met Anatoly Kvorchur, the Russian pilot who at the 1989 Paris Air Show ejected from the seat of a MIG-29 just seconds before it crashed nose-first. The plane went down after a bird was sucked into its engine.

Two days were spent flying, the instructors said. Besides the MIG-29, some of the instructors flew or were passengers in the attack fighters Sukhoi SU-17 and SU-27, the MIG-25, called Foxbat by NATO, and the trainer aircraft Tupolev TU-134.

“It may have been the first time American pilots have been in some of these,” Strittmatter said.

When the Russian test pilot school instructors come to Edwards Air Force Base, Strittmatter said, they will be given the opportunity to fly an F-15 and F-16.

“We intend to show them the same type of program they showed us,” Strittmatter said.