Do you notice anything weird in this cool shot of a MiG-29 rolling above Russian aircraft carrier?

That’s a weird place to install a (handheld) GPS device.

The image in this post was published by the official Twitter account of the Russian «Strizhi» (Swifts) aerial display team.

The team fly 6 MiG-29 Fulcrum jets painted in the typical white, red and dark blue color scheme and they are part of the “Kubinka Diamond,” the Russian Air Force display team made of five  Su-27 Flankers of the “Russian Knights” and the four Fulcrums of the “Swifts.”

The photograph, most probably taken with a GoPro-like camera shows one of the team’s MiGs rolling above the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier. But what is really interesting is the somehow unusual use of a GPS device just below the HUD (Head Up Display) of the aircraft.

Actually, it’s not the position of the GPS to be surprising, as some second-generation MiG-29s carry that system in the same place, but the fact that the device installed in the cockpit of the Swifts Fulcrum seems to be a handheld device (you may see the small antenna on the right).

Image credit: Strizhi

About David Cenciotti

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David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.