Early Soviet made air to air Missles

[Theo]

Hi everyone. This is my first post. I decided to join this forum because of the amazing amount of knowledge I see in the posts.

I have some questions about early Soviet made AA missles and the Mig-21 after watching the show Dogfights on The History Channel. The shows about aerial combat in Vietnam and the skies over the middle east were very interesting. Veteran US and Israeli pilots said thier early version AA missles such as the AIM 7s and 9s had terrible reliability. Many times they failed to fire and just dropped off the plane like a "drop tank". The Sparrows used in Vietnam had to be ripple fired according to the show for the same reason. I was wondering if these missles were so bad, how good could their Soviet made counterparts have been? In some scenes, Mig-21s are shown firing their Atolls but they never track or hit anything. Did a Mig pilot ever shoot anything down with a missle during either conflicts? The show makes the combat seem so one sided. They show the American F4s and Israeli Mirages devasting their opponents usually in Mig-21s. How realistic is this?

[Aggie08]

The show does tend to lean towards showing overwhelming victories of the Allies/Israel/Modern allies of the United States. The first Russian missiles were reverse engineered from our own. An early Sidewinder missile went into the tailpipe of a MiG but failed to explode. The plane made it back to base and the missile was sent to Moscow. Having said that, they could not have been any better than our first models.

The loss ratio in Vietnam favored the United States due to better trained pilots and better technology, just as the Israelis took down their enemy airforces for the same reason. I highly doubt that the MiG-21 has never been successful but the TV show will not be documenting incidents in which the Americans get whipped.