Thanks for the warning Harry.

Arthur:
Last year, I was in Tambov air base and its museum and couldn’t see there any Yak-25RV.

A regular Yak-25 then? It should have been a pole-mounted aircraft, but i will readily admit it could have been something completely different. Mind you, we were watching aircraft from the outside and never (knowingly 😉 ) actually set foot on the base itself.

Well AC-130’s were called ‘Fabulous Four Engined Fighters’ by their crews if that’s what you mean?

And don’t forget that the first Gunships entered service as FC-47. That was later changed to AC-47 because the fighter maffia in the USAF felt some mudmovers were crawling on their turf.

Visible from Andrews AFB? No way it flew that close, i think Andrews is far enough inland that this would have ment a very, very deep intrusion by that Bear. Perhaps from a more coastal airbase?
Besides, i don’t think any of the Soviet aircraft flying down along the US East Coast could evade having an escort of some sort. ADC F-106es and later F-15s were stationed there for a reason, and a scramble to shoo away a stray Bear only after it got into visual range from any US airbase is very, very unlikely if you ask me.

The Yak-25RV Mandrake was a Yakovlev design, not Tupolev. 155 were built, almost half of them actually unmanned Yak-25RV-II drones. It entered operational service only after the Gary Powers incident and no overflights over Western countries were ever made, although it would have been a nice aircraft to have if Khrushchev hadn’t rejected Eisenhower’s Open Skies-proposal in 1955.

The Mandrake did definately overfly China, Pakistan and India. There’s quite a bit of data on it available, but little of it has been translated. A nice link is at http://legion.wplus.net/guide/air/m/yak25rv.shtml

If this is the level of knowledge of the people involved in Save Concorde (snippet from Andrewman’s quote):

Dear Howard

Many thanks for the reply. With the greatest of respect to you and Iain and everyone at Airbus, the situation with Concorde is not acceptable to the nation. Concorde is a British Aviation icon, the likes of which we will probably not see again in our lifetime. To dismiss Concorde as a has been, is to totally forget that she is the only supersonic passenger aircraft in the world…
SNIP
…senior executives of BA and Airbus cannot be allowed to get away with the greatest industrial scandal in British aviation history !

Kind regards

78derngate

then may i suggest another solution?
It’s called RA-771144. This was the last Tu-144 to fly (it made some test flights on behalf of NASA in 1999), and probably has far less obstacles which have to be overcome in order to have it back up in the air. Paint it up in some sort of paintjob that would make Margaret Thatcher proud, and i’m sure lots of people will be very happy. It seems to me the enthusiasm for Concorde for some people has to do more with nationalism than with aviation anyway – surely they won’t notice the difference. Even if they knew something like the Tu-144 existed of course. Besides, nationalism often goes down better with a bit of ignorance :diablo:

You could argue that that was because the turboprop engines were relatively mature and had a ceiling of power and speed close to the bombers of the time anyway, whereas the turbojet and turbofan were still relatively new. Fit a modern Turbofan or even turbojet like the NK-321 to a Bison would certainly improve range and performance… but the positioning of the engines made this difficult.

There were a lot of difficulties in developing the NK-12 engine, and the prototype Tu-95 crashed exactly because of problems with the forerunner of the NK-12. I think that a turboprop the size of the NK-12 was actually more of an engineering challenge than a turbojet: the prop not only needs a turbine core, but also a gearbox. Now think of a gearbox of reasonable size and weight able to cope with 12000 hp, and you’ll find that the Bear’s propulsion is far more complex than the fairly straightforward four-jet Molot.

The Bear stuck with different variants of the NK-12 from it’s second prototype in the 1950s until it’s final production machines in the late 1980s, the Molot on the other hand changed engines plenty of times without ever coming close to the original range requirement for the bomber. The prototype Bison, samolyot 25, had four Mikulin AM-3A’s. The Mya-4 production machines had AM-3D’s, then the 3MS had RD-3M’s (newer versions of the same engine), and finally the 3MN came with Dobrynin VD-7B engines which was retrofitted to some earlier machines as well. I personally think that changing engines so often during such a short production run shows they weren’t all too happy with the performance of the turbojets.

Yep, it was called Aeroflot. The number of accidental route-deviations by civilian aircraft (never mind that the bulk of the Soviet transport fleet was wearing Aeroflot paintschemes too) throughout the Cold War is pretty high.