How the Mig-31 repelled the SR-71 Blackbird from Soviet skies

http://theaviationist.com/2013/12/11/sr-71-vs-mig-31/

by amitkumar01 • 12 years ago

93 37 12 years ago

varjag• 12 years ago

The article is a bit misleading, as no Blackbirds ever flew over Soviet mainland, as far as Soviet air defense and U.S. Congress concerned.

cynwoody• 12 years ago

There was a short window in the early years of the Cold War when US spy planes could overfly the Soviet Union with impunity. But by the time the SR-71 came into service, that era was over, having ended in 1960 with the shooting down of a U-2 (an earlier Kelly Johnson Skunkworks creation) over Sverdlovsk. Of course, although the U-2 flew at altitudes comparable to the SR-71, it was subsonic. Arguably, the Blackbird's much greater speed would have made it harder to shoot down, but with spy satellites available, the Americans didn't want to push their luck.

Prof. Sergei Nikitich Khrushchev, who became a US citizen in 1999 and whose father was General Secretary at the time, wrote a detailed inside account† of the U-2 shoot down. By the time of the shoot-down, U-2s had been overflying the Soviet Union since 1956. Prof. Khrushchev wrote, "After the first U-2 flight, Father felt the Americans must be chortling over our impotence."

In addition to the U-2, Soviet air defense bagged a MiG-19, piloted by Lt. Sergei Safronov, who managed to bail out but died of his injuries. The incident occurred on May Day 1960, a big Soviet holiday, and it seems they were too drunk to change the transponder codes from April, causing the radars to misidentify the MiG as hostile.

†http://www.americanheritage.com/content/day-we-shot-down-u-2...

bane• 12 years ago

I'd probably add that, unlike the SR-71, the U-2 is still in service.

Sadly, the F-35 budget gobbler is also causing the end of the U-2 program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2#Recent_use_and_pl...

kevinastone• 12 years ago

TLDR: By the 1980s, they had missiles fast enough to shoot one down.

lingben2• 12 years ago

yes and no.

there was only really 1 type of missile that had a chance to shoot a blackbird if it was fired under very specific and tight conditions and timings.

a radar lock is one thing, a kill is another.

as the comments on the article cite, the best probability of a theoretical kill on a blackbird was accomplished by Sweden using Viggen interceptors. Theoretical because they didn't fire.

The USAF acknowledge this with a congratulatory fax to the Swedes.

dfc• 12 years ago

That is a fax I would love to see.

kbelbina• 12 years ago

Aviation week on HN continues in full swing.

RRRA• 12 years ago

Yeah, what's up with that?! Is this Air force News now? :P

bjoerns• 12 years ago

wish I could contribute. i got my wings (just a PPL) 4 years ago and the craziest two manoeuvres I've ever flown were: 1. a recovery from a spin. 2. turning back to my local airfield because my 2-year old son was puking like crazy in the back... now all these blackbird stories make me really, really jealous.

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

I was watching Dogfights off of YouTube, and saw that one F4 Phantom pilot had developed a technique of purposely "departing" his Phantom from controlled flight as a radical airbrake to force Migs to overshoot, and actually got to use it in combat. And it worked!

mikeash2• 12 years ago

Might I suggest a glider rating? My opinion, and yours of course may vary, is that it's vastly more interesting and exciting.

There's nothing quite like pounding along at ridgetop level, two hundred feet off the trees, going 120kts with everything bouncing around the cockpit. Or sitting in perfectly still air at 12,000ft, climbing effortlessly, watching airliners wander through below.

zokier• 12 years ago

What's with the recent uptick of military aircraft stories? Not that I have anything against them, but seems just bit curious.

diminish• 12 years ago

it's a prelude for hn for aviation, coming up soon.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Its a feedback loop, they make it to the front page, the submitter thus gets a bit of karma, so other folks hunt around and submit stories they think are cool. If you plot front page stories over time you can see this effect in action. If the topic is interesting to you, its "cool" and if the topic is not interesting its "annoying" :-)

cl8ton• 12 years ago

I suspect its karma building posts.

I noticed the phenomena when an off topic post gets popular real quick and makes the FP, other related stories quickly get posted.

Not that there is anything wrong with it, its just something I’ve noticed.

EDIT: Just saw ChuckMcM's post. Didn't mean to be redundant, but I'll leave it here anyways.

iveqy• 12 years ago

The Swedish Viggen locked on the Blackbird several times... http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-659...

Tomis02• 12 years ago

20 years is a long time.

cstross2• 12 years ago

Besides the MiG-31 and the JAS-37 Viggen, there are persistent stories about the gun camera footage from a Royal Air Force English Electric Lightning that bounced the SR-71 that set the trans-Atlantic speed record on its way into the Farnborough Air Show in 1974. (The RAF knew its flight plan in advance, so they sent a particularly "hot" Lightning F.3 out over the Atlantic: it tanked up, climbed on a ballistic trajectory, and bounced the SR-71 from above and behind. Much sniggering allegedly ensued, behind closed doors.)

The Lightning was a world speed record holder in its day, and had a ridiculous climb rate and service ceiling -- the RAF admitted to "over 60,000 feet" in the 1960s: they made intercepts on U-2s on a regular basis, and are confirmed to have hit 88,000 feet on ballistic profiles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Electric_Lightning#Clim...

(It's only with the introduction of the Eurofighter Typhoon II into service that the RAF has fielded another aircraft with the high speed performance of the Lightning, after a gap of more than 20 years.)

themodelplumber• 12 years ago

The MiG-31 and Viggen stories have a lot of shaky details, like whether their AAMs could have even reached the SR-71 with 20K vertical feet left to cover, etc. Radar lock notwithstanding.

Now the story of the ballistic climb with the Lightning seems cut from the same cloth, with even the current Wikipedia reading "88,000" yet "trading speed for altitude." What does it really matter, when a mach 2.0 craft like the lightning reaches 88K feet, yet is trading speed for altitude?

The comments on the article are enlightening; for example: "The multi-component surveillance mission never, ever, reported any "lock-on" by any aircraft, from any nation"

Hmm...

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

In the case of the Lightning, it supposedly could have gotten itself up to 87K in the path of an SR-71, and gotten a missile lock, had the Lightning been capable of firing radar guided missiles, but from what I've read, this was not the case. (Also, maneuvering to orient the plane for missile launch would've been dubious at best.)

delinka• 12 years ago

"...trading speed for altitude" Sounds to me like it trades using power to attain speed for using power to counter gravity. IOW, when it goes (near) vertical, it loses lots of speed but can gain a tremendous altitude.

downer76• 12 years ago

  A Lightning flying at optimum climb profile would reach 
  36,000 ft in under three minutes.

((36000 / 5280) / 3) * 60 = ~136 Miles per Hour

...well that's not very fast at all!</sarcasm>

cstross2• 12 years ago

Optimum != Maximum

NB: 36,000 feet in 3 minutes is 12,000 feet/min. Max climb rate for the Lightning was 50,000 feet/min, but it got there by basically pumping fuel into the afterburners with a fire hose.

(The Lightning had two main defects as an air defense interceptor: insane fuel burn rate at max thrust, and limited armament. The longest ever recorded sortie without in-flight refueling was 1h56m, but it was common for them to be running low on gas and need to tank up 20 minutes after a hot scramble.)

jessriedel• 12 years ago

What does "bounced" mean?

jwatte• 12 years ago

Small correction: I believe it was a JA-37, not JAS.

31reasons• 12 years ago

HN Turning into Aircraft News ? #SaveHN

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

Just as a sort of FYI in case it isn't well known, commenting is a form of upvoting here, so the ideal response to let something fall off the front page an into obscurity is to just note it and move on :-). Eventually people think "Oh another plane story" and ignore it, and balance is restored.

HCIdivision17• 12 years ago

I hope I'm not the only one enjoying the meta discussion going on, with interesting links to impressive aeronautical engineering feats pinging back and forth. I feel like HN decided to have an after-hours conversation on these planes, and a bunch of us get the pleasure to peek at a subinterest of apparently a bunch of hacker-types.

shitlord• 12 years ago

Airplanes are cool as hell. The entire concept of aviation is kind of a hack in itself, right?

A post about airplanes is way better than some thinly-veiled ad for a startup, though.

tsotha• 12 years ago

Agreed. I'd rather see an aviation story than one on yet another Twitter clone.

Dylan16807• 12 years ago

You don't have to fabricate a justification of 'hacking'. It's a good story, let it stand in its merits.

rektide2• 12 years ago

A Mig-25 (fielded 1964) was allegedly clocked on radar over Israel in 1973 doing Mach 3.2.

How long it took to figure out that the thing's afterburners were stuck in the full-on position, how long it took to realize it wasn't equipped with adequate targeting or missiles- unknown. While the Mig-31 (1981) was indeed engineered to make a real stand, and this article talks to that, I don't think this article builds a case for or against anyone having any real idea whether the SR-71 (1966) was vulnerable to the Mig-25 or not. If the question is "what repelled the SR71," the question isn't the technical merits of the Mig-31, it's the question of what was known v.s. unknown about what when.

The question of the Mig-25's capabilities were answered more clearly after Viktor Belenko defected with one in 1976. It was not a threat. How long it took to figure that out, and American confidence that Viktor's Mig-25 was as good as any other they'd likely see, remain unknown factors. The Mig-31 (1981) wasn't really much faster, leading to the carefully coordinated chase described in the article, but it at least had an electronics suite, radar, communications link, and armaments capable of making it's threat visibly apparent.

Certainly the Zaslon phased-array radar is impressive and the R-33 missile specs give it the on paper capabilities to hit a SR-71. Yet the article's talks of only two events where an interception occurred, one undated, the second in 1986, after the first major upgrade to the Zaslon radar and the whole time using the very first Soviet in flight digital computer, acquiring targets for a 1970's designed missile the R-33 (fielded 1981).

Karn• 12 years ago

Further info in support of the above comment:

- The Mig had been manufactured in February 1976 and thus was one of their latest most sophisticated production aircraft.

- Transistor circuitry was not used but instead the Soviets relied on vacuum tubes for most of their electronics.

- The Soviets reasoned the vacuum tubes were less affected by EMP waves in the case of nuclear attack; were more resistant to temperature extremes and they were easy to replace in remote airfields where transistors may not be readily available if repairs were needed.

- Welding was done by hand.

- Rivet heads were exposed in areas not critical to parasitic aerodynamic drag.

- Pilot forward vision was highly obstructed.

- With huge Tumansky R-15D-300 engines the Mig was considered almost a rocket.

- Pilots were forbidden to exceed Mach 2.5. There was a total of three engine instruments and the airspeed indicator was redlined at 2.8 Mach.

- Above Mach 2.8 the engines would overheat and burn up. The Americans had clocked a Mig-25 over Israel at Mach 3.2 in 1973. Upon landing in Egypt, the engines were totally destroyed. We did not understand that the engine destruction was inevitable.

- The combat radius is 186 miles.

- Without using afterburner; staying at optimum altitude and not maneuvering, the Mig can fly in a straight line for 744 miles.

- The plane was so heavy at 64,200 pounds, that according to early rumors Soviet designers had to eliminate a pilot ejection system. However this was disproved.

- Most MiG-25s used the KM-1 ejector seat. The last versions used an early variant of the famous K-36 seat. The speed record for the fastest successful ejection (Mach 2.67) is held by a KM-1 equipped MiG-25.

- Maximum operational altitude: Carrying two missiles, 78,740 feet (for maximum two minutes duration); carrying four missiles, 68,900 feet is maximum.

- Maximum altitude of missiles: 88,588 feet.

- Ability to intercept an SR-71: Belenko states the Mig-25 cannot intercept the SR-71 for several reasons: The SR-71 fly too high and too fast; the Mig cannot reach it or catch it. The missiles lack the velocity to overtake the SR-71 and in the event of a head on missile fire (The Golden BB), the Guidance system cannot adjust to the high closure rate of the SR-71.

- The Mig-25 has a jam proof radar but cannot distinguish targets below 1,640 feet due to ground clutter. The radar was so powerful it could burn through jamming signals by approaching bombers.

- Maximum G load: With full fuel tanks 2.2 G's is max; with near empty fuel tanks, 5 G's is dangerous. The Mig-25 cannot turn inside a U.S. F-4 Phantom fighter!

- The plane was made of steel alloy, not high temperature titanium, although strips of titanium was used in areas of high heat concentration.

- In a tight turn the missiles could be ripped from the wings.

- The Mig-25 was was not a fighter or an air superiority aircraft but rather designed by the Soviets to climb at tremendous speeds, fire missiles at one pass of the target and then land.

- Search and tracking radar had a range of 55.9 miles.

- The pilot duties were to take off, turn on the auto pilot and await instructions to fire the missiles from ground controllers. The Mig-25 had a superb auto pilot and digital communications from an onboard computer to ground controllers.

- Credit is given to the Soviets for building a high altitude Interceptor in a short period of time with the materials and engines available to them in 1967 in order to counter the perceived threat of the XB-70.

Source: http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/mig25.html

How the Mig-31 repelled the SR-71 Blackbird from Soviet skies

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