The MiG Diaries

Fighter pilot memoirs & accounts of Cuban, SAAF and Angolan air combat in Southern African skies

By: Lionel Reid, Eduardo González

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What was it like to fly a MiG or Mirage in combat over Angola?

Most books on the Angolan Bush War, especially those in English, present the South African perspective of events. Now a former MiG-23 Squadron Commander of the Cuban Air Force has collaborated with an ex-SAAF pilot to paint a remarkable new picture of the aerial conflict over Angola in the 1980s.

In The MiG Diaries the recollections of Lt-Col Eduardo González Sarría are blended by Lionel Reid with those of air combatants from the Angolan, Cuban and South African air forces. Many are being published for the first time. Using their own aviation knowledge and experience of the conflict, Sarría and Reid combine the accounts of these diverse combatants – former comrades and foe – to provide original insights into, and a more holistic description of, what happened in the skies over Angola. The results, often quite different to what the opposing sides had believed, reveal a surprising, and more complete, picture of events.

The wonderful sketching pencil of Sean Thackwray, himself a former fighter pilot, helps to bring this unique story to life, along with select images, including many not seen in print in South Africa.


“This superbly written book reads with the pace and excitement of a novel” – Flypast, UK, January 2024

“There has seldom, if ever, been a better book on aerial warfare” – SA Flyer, December 2023

"Thoroughly deserves to be our book of the year” – Aviation News, UK, December 2023

“I must congratulate Lionel and Eduardo on an excellent historical account of the air combat activities in South Angola during the 1980s” – Carlo Gagiano, former Chief of the South African Air Force

Great book with poor narration

I found the book well-written and informative, so my 5-star rating is for that.

I can't give the Virtual Voice narration more than 3 stars though. While the narration is, in general, quite good and sounds human, it fell down in two areas.

I'm not a Spanish or Portuguese speaker, but I felt that the pronunciation of the Cuban and Angolan names sounded like I thought they should. The South African names were a different matter. The Afrikaans names were largely mispronounced, as is often the case, even with human audiobook narrators, but even English ones were sometimes mispronounced. One of the South African pilots was Desmond Barker, known as Des, and rather than correctly pronouncing this as "dez", the AI repeatedly pronounced it as "day". Only once when it spoke his full name, followed by the short version in the following sentence did it pronounce it correctly as "dez".

Most problematic though was the pronunciation of aircraft names and models, particularly when plurals were applied.

The terms MiG and MiGs appear throughout the book, and while MiG was mostly pronounced correctly as "mig", the plural MiGs was mostly pronounced as "mee-gees" or sometimes "miggies". And where aircraft models like MiG-23ML and MiG-23BN were used in the plural form MiG-23MLs and MiG-23BNs, they were not pronounced as "em-elz" or "be-enz" but as "em-el-es" and "be-en-es" as if the S was part of the designation.

So if you're likely to find the constant need to allow for pronunciation errors distracting, I suggest you read the textual version of the book rather than listening to the audiobook.