challenge Soviet advisors and demand greater operational flexibility for himself and other pilots of his unit. During Mohammed's first clashes with the Israeli Air Force, he realized that there was a need for an effective defensive maneuver in close combat that forced a pursuer to overshoot. His initial solution based on Soviet manuals consisted of rapid descending turns followed by a sudden activation of the afterburner and a climb. However, during a test flight in early 1967, Mohammad inadvertently pitched the nose of his MiG-21 too hard, so that the forward movement of his aircraft nearly stopped. In reaction, he engaged the afterburner of his MiG, and ended with the plane standing vertically on the verge of stalling out of control. Mohammad managed to recover the plane from that state, just in time to prevent a crash. Intrigued, he decided to try to replicate the maneuver in a controlled manner, this time by engaging the afterburner beforehand, as the Tumansky R-11 engine of the MiG-21 had to spool for full effect. After successful replication of the maneuver, it became clear that this was the close combat defensive maneuver that he sought. The Syrians named the cobra the "zero-speed maneuver" ( "munawarat alsureat sifr"). Mohammad soon saw combat again with the Israeli Air Force but never got to use the maneuver. The cobra quickly became a standard part of defensive tactics for Syrian Mig-21s. Pakistan and Egypt With time, as their air forces were stationed in Syria, the maneuver spread to both the Pakistan and Egyptian air force, who also began using it as a standard defensive maneuver for their MiG-21s, as well on their Chinese counterparts, Chengdu F-7s. The cobra maneuver may have been performed in combat by an Egyptian pilot during the Yom Kippur War, but the theory is based on a quote from an Israeli pilot that only mentions an Egyptian MiG-21 apparently standing on its tail while trying to evade an attack. Soviet Union Research and developments on supermaneuverability started in USSR in the early 1980s by Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute, Gromov Flight Research Institute, Sukhoi and Mikoyan. In flight testing the Su-27 test pilot Igor Volk was the first to perform the maneuver in that aircraft in practice. Viktor Pugachev was the first who publicly demonstrated the maneuver in the Su-27 aerobatics display at the Le Bourget airshow of 1989. The cobra maneuver came to public attention