Part of that was due to the Soviet reliance on Ground Controlled Intercept (GCI)
Once the intruding aircraft was detected, a CGI controller would direct Soviet aircraft against the intruder and direct the air battle. The Soviet pilots were not given much control over their tasks and thus had little flexibility.
There was a very long command chain that controlled their actions and made their decisions for them.
I recall hearing a related comment by some South African PMC who had a number of Russian pilots in their company to fly Mi-8/Mi-17 helicopters. This was sometime in the late 2000s. The comment was essentially that the Russian pilots lacked initiative and had to be told what to do most of the time. Basically the Russian pilots needed to be supervised because if something out of the ordinary came up, they had not been trained to react to it but to wait for someone higher up the command chain to make a decision for them.
|