MIG-21 and its service in India.
MIG-21 was foul mouthed by most, lead by arms lobby based in London. They wished to sell another plane to India in place of MIG-21, so what a better way to sell including bring out its defects. The MIG -21 was mainstay of Russian airforce comparable to American Phantom but at half the price. Most east European airforces called it a rocket.
In mid ninety after the fall of Soviet Union, the spare parts pipeline dried unless India paid a much higher price. It was Ukraine which stepped forward with spares. Most spares Ukraine had copies or spurious parts, which they sold to India at half price. Happy with the price but unknowingly spurious these were bought by India.
Trouble began, crashes mounted and nobody knew the reasons. A call was given to dump these “Widow Makers” and the Western countries will be delighted to replace them at a huge cost. Also it was an era of incompetent President Yeltsin in Russia, even help to India to fix the problems was not up in his mind. Finally, India figured out the reasons of the crashes. All the remaining Ukrainian spare parts were dumped. Russia was contracted to supply parts for the remaining MIGs and maintenance procedures were upgraded and then the crashes stopped. It is still flying. It has been upgraded three times and made into fighter which the adversaries on Indian subcontinent fear. Unfortunate for them, It did shoot down the Pakistani F-16, three tears back. Unfortunately, cornered by a bunch and alone it itself got shot down.
The point here is that foul mouthing is done by the West for its own greedy purposes. It is a worthless effort, although public morale in India suffered hugely with constant crashes and also with western propaganda. These crashes do not happen now.
Pakistan will not face up to these planes again with overconfidence, because they learnt a bitter lesson. Now these MIG-21 are being retired with LCAs which will blow their outdated airforce out of the sky.