SHAH ALAM: SELAMAT jalan, Fulcrum? With less than 10 days to go before the new year, there is still no word from RMAF whether or not it will retire its Mig-29N Fulcrum fleet. We know however that there is no upgrade planned for the fleet which will extend their service lives.

With the defence budget coming under pressure due to the uncertain economic conditions, it is likely that RMAF had already made its choice. As I have written before due to the sensitivity of the issue no announcement will be made. As the old ballad says: “An old soldier never dies, they just fade away”.

And no, we are not buying the JF-17 from Pakistan, despite reports to the contrary (as such I am not posting any comments on the issue).

As this a photo tribute, I am posting a slew of pictures of the Fulcrums. Some are from my own collection while others courtesy of many Google search especially the air-to-air ones of course.

During my research for this post, I found that many of the images of the Fulcrums on the Internet were the same ones. I cannot find any images of the tail number 17 and 07, which were lost in crashes in 1998 and 2004, respectively.

If you have them or know the link to the images and others not featured here namely 05, please do so in the comments section.

The Fulcrum with the most images on the Internet is of course the M43-03 as pictured above. I am not sure whether its the same air-frame through out the years. Perhaps it is a couple of Fulcrum air-frames marked as O3 along the years. I could be wrong though I must concede.

And last but not least, a picture of a Fulcrum flying with a US Navy Tomcat. The picture was probably taken in 2004 prior to the retirement of the latter.

For all the men and women who fly and maintained the Fulcrums, through-out the years, thank you for your service. As for the Fulcrums, Paka…

— Malaysian Defence

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