Why is the mig 29 called fulcrum?

Soviet aircraft were designed and numbered in secret, and Western intelligence often knew an aircraft existed long before it learned its real designation. To let pilots, analysts and radio operators talk about a type without ambiguity, the Air Standardization Coordinating Committee, a body linking the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, assigned every Soviet aircraft a reporting name that NATO then adopted. The MiG-29 received “Fulcrum” around 1979, when satellite photographs showed prototypes at the Ramenskoye test centre and analysts still called it “Ram-L”.

The system is simple. The first letter tells you the role: F for fighter, B for bomber, C for cargo, H for helicopter, M for miscellaneous. The number of syllables tells you the propulsion: one syllable for propeller aircraft, two for jets. Hence “Fulcrum” for a jet fighter, alongside “Flanker” for the Su-27, “Foxbat” for the MiG-25 and “Fishbed” for the MiG-21. The words were chosen to be distinctive when spoken over a noisy radio, so they could not be confused with each other or with ordinary commands.

The meaning of “fulcrum”, the pivot on which a lever turns, was not chosen to describe the aircraft. Some later commentators saw a fitting metaphor in a fighter designed to be the pivot of Soviet frontal aviation, but that is an interpretation after the fact.

Mikoyan, the design bureau, used the internal product number “9” and the service designation MiG-29. Soviet and Russian pilots never used NATO names, and some resented them; “Fulcrum” only became familiar in Russia after the Cold War, when Western aviation books circulated freely. Today the MiG-29 flies with more than twenty air forces, several of them NATO members, so the reporting name is now used by the people flying it.