A defence journalist of my acquaintance has drawn my attention to the following brief article by Bill Sweetman:
I was already familiar with the basic details of the story, since it had resulted in ‘Flight’ publishing what at first sight looked like a ‘leak’ from a US study of the likely performance of the Tu-22M – figures that were described to me at the time as looking like a rounded-off version of the classified estimate. Officialdom east and west were not amused.
A search of the ‘Flight’ archive for 1977 will show that the “Russian” alluded to in Sweetman’s text was almost certainly “Georg Panyalev”, the pen-name of a then contributor to the ‘International Defense Review”. The relevant pages show how “Panyalev” crossed swords with Sweetman on several occasions, an experience that saw the ‘IDR’ man retire wiser and with scars. They also give some further insight into the methods that Sweetman used for his open-source analyses.
Why Sweetman never applied similar techniques of analysis to later Soviet, Russian, and Chinese aircraft must remain a matter for conjecture.
Sweetman’s comments on the MiG-23 were echoed to the present writer in the late 1970s by the knowledge that Soviet pilots reassigned to the -23 were far from enamoured with their new mount. I cannot help wondering how the Mikoyan OKB managed to get the design so wrong.
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December 10, 2015 at 11:29 am