World's Most POWERFUL Civilian Owned Fighter Jet & Start Up.

This is the Russian MiG-23 that's a supersonic fighter jet. The world's most powerful single engine jet owned by a civilian. And today, we're gonna start it up. It's MiG time, boom, boom, boom. This is Will, he's the owner of this MiG-23 behind us and he is gonna be selling it. You could buy it for 100,000 bucks. What a deal. We are joined by the legendary Gary that does Gary things as you can see by his t-shirt. My favorite t-shirt ever. He is a young spring chicken of 82 years, 11 months and like a couple of weeks, right? Yes. It's amazing. And he is here helping get this thing where we can fire it up. My understanding is these batteries, which Gary told me earlier, they actually come from powered wheelchairs? Correct. Correct, fantastic story. And then these batteries start a smaller jet engine. That's correct. So an auxiliary power unit, I guess, kind of thing. So the small batteries start a small jet engine that then will start the big behemoth. You bet. Okay. One of the cool things here is a swing wing on the MiG-23. Coming back here, the afterburner nozzle. That's just fun to say. Yeah, you got the convergent nozzle right here. And then the big one here is the divergent. Wait, hold on, explain to me. So we got the normal jet engine on the inside. Yep. And then what exactly, an afterburner does what? So the afterburner, you're taking fuel and just injecting it into the exhaust. You get this augmentation, this increase of thrust, say 50 to 80%. What happens on the jet engines, on airliners, you're not having to deal with all these fluctuations and temperatures and pressures, but if you got the afterburner, now you've got all this air and pressure and temperature changes. So the convergent nozzle actually modulates that and keeps the engine from choking on itself. So then also, then you've got the divergent nozzle here. And what happens with this is all this pressure's coming out of here and it kind of trims it out a little bit, utilizes the energy a little bit more. So you've got two nozzles here, convergent and divergent. Gary, what are you working on over here? Well, I was the one making noise up there. Okay. And I remembered that I had a mic on. But what we did, what we do before we run the engine, is we take this access cover off. Oh, wow. And if you look in here, I'll let you step up here. Oh, you can actually see the inside of the engine there. That's the first stage of the compressor. You gotta come see this. That is crazy cool. That's the first stage of the compressor. And we always check that for nicks, pieces missing, cracks. You need to know. Jimmy, you can stick your hand in there and turn that first stage compressor. Okay. And just listen to how smooth it runs. That is the smoothest. Is that something, I get geeked up about that. But that's the noise that you heard was me taking the access cover off. But this also is where you heard Will talk about this being a nitrogen airplane. And this is where we service the nitrogen, right there. Okay. With this coupler through that bottle. All right. So how much nitrogen does this take and how much does it use? It depends what the mission is today or tomorrow if we start. We're gonna use very little. The only thing we're gonna be using nitrogen for is to get the canopy open, which also has a manual backup. You can manually open up the canopy. And then the brakes for the Meg 23 are pneumatic also as is 17, 19, 21, 23, and 25. So it's a pneumatic based systems for not all of them but it's lighter and it's simpler than hydraulics. This has two hydraulic systems also that power different systems. But the pneumatics, we've never had a problem with leakage and it's a lighter program than hydraulics. And if I, like on a Meg 15, they have the little brake handle up there and every time you let off, it releases the nitrogen into the air. Does this do the same thing? Yes, it does. So every time you hold it, the nitrogen goes, you let go, it goes, and now your nitrogen's gone and lost to the wreck. Yeah, so it's gotta be replenished every time depending on how far you're taxiing, what you're doing. But the Russians used nitrogen forever because of the cold weather and the cold environment. And back in the 30s, when they really developed nitrogen, there was no really good hydraulic fluid. It all went to like syrup in the wintertime or jello. So they used nitrogen. This airplane does not have air refueling capability. Holds 1,200 gallons. So one of the videos that I saw on YouTube was they would park these at the border. When their adversaries come in, they'd just go up and do battle right there. Knowing that they had, what, maybe a half hour? On the 21, very short range, 35 minutes if you're tapping the afterburner. So they can suck down 1,200 gallons in 30 minutes. Yeah, yeah, and looking back to the F-4, all the aircraft of this generation, the F-4, 105, Meg 21, Meg 23, if you stay in burner from the time you release the brakes, you're out of gas in about seven or eight minutes. So, yeah. There's a hydraulic line with a B-nut and they safety all the B-nuts. When you look, every B-nut in here is safety. And none of the American airplanes have wire safety B-nuts. I've changed a lot of the safety wire. Oh my goodness, now that's funny. Also very cool thing about the Meg 23 is a special strake. And when the landing gear tracks, this big strake extends down and it- Wait, what? Yeah, it adds to the- Oh, I didn't realize that. Longitudinal stabilability. I didn't know what you said. Stability. I got it, I didn't know what you said. So that's really cool. And that extends when the landing gear is retracted and when the landing gear is extended, it folds back up like this right here. So we also have four speed brakes, two in the bottom here and two up top. And we'll be cycling those tomorrow. Yeah, so there's some cool stuff here. We were talking about the starter. This is the intake and exhaust for the TS-21 here and puts out about 80 horsepower. Oh my Lord, have mercy. I said they were heavy. They're not kidding, $12. Son of a, gosh. How much do one of these things weigh? I don't know, but I used to. I mean, I used to put them in and take them out easy, but anymore. So you got mark left on this one, so put this one in? Yeah. All right. Good workout. Okay, on the back of that, I didn't show you, but we'll look at the other one. There's two alignment pins and two contact pins. Here we go, right there. Is that easy? That's your alignment pins and the contact pins are in here. They go down there. Interesting. And these are the locks that you just? Yep, yep, just locks right in. Okay, so now does this one go on the other side? Correct, goes on the other side. You want me to go ahead and put it in? Yeah. All right. If you feel like you're putting a battery in a supersonic fighter jet. And just? Yep, and then push it in, the plug should engage and you have to fiddle around with it a little bit. There you go. You like that, huh? Smells like jet fuel. Time to fill up the nitrogen system. Open the cockpit. Just enough, okay? Right now, I'm just looking, I haven't been in the cockpit for about five months, so I'm just looking for the general placement of the switches. Everything's in the right position. Idle cutoff on the throttle. I'll be going through a more extensive checklist a little bit later, but one of the first things I wanna do is check the battery power. You can hear a little tick back there, that's the fuel valve being pneumatically opened. So, and if you see this silence right here, that's a master caution right there. That tells me, hey, something's going on and it can come down to the annunciator panel down here and take a look, we'll do a check on that. You can see all the systems have annunciators so we know what's going on. And then a little bit later, I'll be coming back up and just kind of sitting down and getting refamiliarized with the cockpit and then put some gas in it and we'll start it up. This is the tow bar that we're gonna need to hook up. So we gotta steal it off of the F-14 Tomcat and go put it on the flogger. Yeah, okay, I got it out. Okay, now, let's raise this up. You wanna go down on that end. Okay, okay, I'm clear. Then pull it straight out. Oh, this is balanced really well. Yeah, it is. Wow. Not how well this is balanced. You gotta say it weighs 2,000 pounds and then you're squeezing like pancakes. I'm clear. Only had to put 140 gallons in it to start it. Will it start on just the wheelchair batteries? That's a negative, Ghost Rider. All right, so it looks like we are gonna need the GPU. The batteries just didn't have quite the oomph that we're gonna need. So we're bringing the GPU over to hook it up so we can have all the power to get this thing lit off. This thing will use over 1,000 amps to get this engine going. Now let's see some real action. That's usually not good. It never would fire up again. We couldn't figure it out all afternoon. Well, fiddle sticks. So we gotta get out, drag this thing back in the hangar and let them work on it and come back a different time and try again later. Well, you get that on them big jobs. Well, it turns out we may have been mistaken. So just come look at this. So inside of here, there's a fuel shutoff valve which is usually left in the on position. It's also flagged. The previous guy had stuffed the flag in there and turned the fuel shutoff valve off. So we think that's our issue. So hopefully right away, we're gonna get a good start in rock and roll. It ain't got no gas in it. As it warms up, they exercise the wings and all of the flaps. That's enough. Let's give it the beans. All right, so that wasn't even the afterburner because they wouldn't allow us to do an afterburner because we don't have the right tie downs because if he kicked in the government button, this sucker would have hopped up and ended up somewhere in the next county over before you can get it stopped. So that wasn't even the afterburner. That was just like the normal peacetime noise maker. Subscribe if you like this kind of stuff because there is more coming. Huge shout out to Chase and the whole gang at the Florida Air Museum here at Sun and Fun in Lakeland. Without them, none of this would have happened. So thank you all for that.