Superb job.. and brings back memories of fliyng on Tridents from LHR in the early 70s….

Especially at this time of year.

Looking forward to seeing her on her legs again.

The IWM’s remit in collecting terms is pretty wide…which means that anything operated, owned, captured or liberated by UK forces is fair game.

The American Air Museum is a way of getting a wider net of UK based American hardware into the equation.

It is not simply a Museum of Warfare….their remit does have limits…

B-52s may not have dropped weapons in anger in Europe, but they were and are regular visitors to these shores.. moreso than the F-117, even if they were delpoyed during operations in Kosovo.

That the IWM would like to have one is not the issue.. I’m sure they would, but how it is intergrated into the collection would be interesting…

Mind it would be pretty special to have a U-2, SR and F-117 in the same building.. spanning the best of the Kelly/ Rich Skunk Works era.

Wroughton.. a Dan Air liveried 4.

Chrom,

Why don’t you actually read Eisenhower’s postion on overflights and the operation of U-2 before posting an ignorant quip like that…
He was very reluctant to authorise overflights..and he was appraised of each and every one and its aims; giving authority for each mission as he knew full well the potential to change a Cold War to a Hot one..

MiG,

You really need to do some BASIC research into the operation of the recon programme and the parameters governing it… yes you know those rules that the civilians who control the military set…like making overflights illegal?

It serves as a far greater deterent to pilots and commanders if they know that a sentence in Leavenworth is waiting for them.

It does not prevent overfligths… by ‘accident’… but an SR flight was expected to maintain the ‘black line’.

If as you say, the MiG 25 was such a deterent, why then were there no overflights prior to 1976..when ‘officially’ the capabilities of the 25 were known, and the SR had been operational for some eight years. And perhaps you can explain why there were nonoe afterwards either…perhaps because the threat provided by the Mig 25 was not relevant to the planned operations in peacetime and even in war time not terribly threatening…

In all your rambling detail about missile performance and kill ratios you are making one big assumption …that of being able…aircraft performance aside, of getting that aircraft into a position to enable those missiles to exploit their performance…

The ops against F-15s and F-14s proved that very important point. The succesful intercepts occured when the time of arrival and bearing of the aircraft was known. This permited the ‘interceptors’ to be in the right area before the SR arrived. The same applied to the SR ‘intercepts’ by MiGs, they occured whilst the SRs were on a known flight track, with the MiG crews forewarned by the very nature of the operations from the UK…

It really helps to know where the SR is going and when it is coming in order to position the interceptors.. read the Soviet accounts.. its is what they are saying…

It would potentially have been a different issue had the entire air defence system been forced to react to an ‘unexpected’ SR arrival…my guess is that they would not have been able to position either a 25 or 31 within the kill envelope with any great certainty…not impossible, but certainly not reliably..

All of this to say that whilst in theory the Mig 25 and Mig 31 were capable of intercepting an SR and using their capable armament to kill it this was never a factor in planning SR operations.. nor a reason to retire the SR fleet.. that lay solely within the Pentagon, more precisely in the USAF offices therein….

As for the A-12 being slower I guess a lighter plane with a smaller overall wetted area, and a lower overall drag total is going to be slower…..or perhaps basic physics can be altered to suit…

The train however is a 6ft AGL… the plane possibly a little higher…so the relative motion is far greater in the train than the plane…. 😉

That reminds me of the SR versus F-14 and F-15 experiments in the late 70s early 80s…both the USN and TAC wanted to ‘demonstrate’ their ability to intercept and kill a high flying fast intruder…and used the SR as a typical example.

SAC were game at the time….and the rules set….

The rules stated that the time and bearing on arrival of the SR were to be known to the airborne interceptors…this information was communicated and hey presto intercepts and kills resulted….

However pride got the better of the fighter pilots and their success was crowed from every roof top…much to SAC’s annoyance…so the game was replayed… using SAC rules…which consisted of.. ‘we will be in this area in an SR starting from XXXXH..see if you there’

This time the game was a whitewash for the SR…every one heard them..nobody saw them and no intercepts or kills were scored.

What is easy to overlook is that all the SR missions from Mildenhall were all ‘combat’ missions, they were playing for real. So every departure was ‘announced’ to those who were observing the operations, actions on the airfield, proceedures and so forth…every departure took a very ‘familiar path’…it behaved in a predictable and unsurprising manner….whether leaving for the Baltic, N Germany or ConUS….just so that every one observing the SRs knew what was what.

This applied throughout the mission profile for precisely that reason…the Warsaw PACT knew an SR was airborne and probably coming their way long before it appeared on their radar…so that when it appeared heading towards them at M3+ it surprised nobody….interceptors could be launched knowing they were looking for an SR and knowing pretty much were it was going to be…..etc etc…

This is confirmed by the reports by Soviet pilots in their ‘planning’ to intercept an SR over the Baltic. It depended on the SR taking the known and predicted track over the Baltic and the interceptors being able to cut corners off that track in order to gain time over the SR to reach a ‘viable’ launch position.

This predictability was vitally important as ‘unexpected’ aircraft were not welcomed by the USSR, rightly or wrongly, as demonstrated by the shoot down of a number of aircraft…and the USSR were not exactly keen on the fall out of shooting an aircraft down. NATO were also known for not being very keen on unexpected visitors.. hence the fairly predictable flight path of Bears etc via the GIUK gap…always pretty much the same path, sameish spped , samish altitude…

What was never tested, ‘as far as we know’ was a ‘surprise’ mission. One which did not follow a predictable pattern, one which simulated a ‘no holds barred’ flight…from start to finish. Sure there were faints and dummy turns once in flight near the border to provoke a reponse but these were done from a ‘safe’ position.. ie they knew the SR was coming, but until it turned there was always a possibility it was going to go straight on and over…..so the appropriate responses were provoked. It served both parties aims… the Soviets practiced for real and demonstrated the ability to react.. the US learnt how they reacted….both sides knew that it was the ‘game’.. and both played it. Whether or not it would have played out that way for real, will thankfully, never be known.

The F-12 was designed to have the same quick reaction alert status as other interceptors… Lockheed designed a quick cartridge start system…

For alert status the a/c are preflighted up and including engine start..then everything is reset, ready for a quick start…this is done prior to that a/c going on alert status… so how long it takes is economics not reaction time…
Afterall an F-15 on alert is not preflighted by the crew before they launch, so why would an F-12.

The cartridge starter was able to start the engines quickly and the alert bird is off….if certain systems needed to be kept warm then the internal or external heaters would have been used.. in the same way other birds are kept live by external power if required.

Once it returns the a/c is then no longer necessarily on alert…another airframe can replace it….So any post flight inspections and preflighting time is ‘off-alert’ and hence its a question of how many airframes the service wants to maintain in a high state of readiness… in order to achieve the required alert level..

Remember the SR was employed in a far more ‘cautious and deliberate’ manner. The nature of the ops was such that the flight was far more ‘controlled’ than an intercept…accuracy of flight was of primary importance…deviations being unacceptable…a single degree climb translated into a 3000fpm climb/ dive..a 1 degree course deviation giving a similarly wild positional change…..getting over enemy territory very quickly.

Hence preflight and post start checks were far more extensive, especially internal nav alignment than a continental US interceptor would expect to require. The highly sensitive nature of its missions added to the need to ensure the a/c was able to carry ou the mission fully and not have to divert, to a non secure facility, the additional checks and ground running time aided this process.

The extended nature of the SR mission also pushed the entire system to its design limits, an interceptor would possibly not have pushed those limits as hard for as long…..hence a reduced overall maintenance load.

All theoretical of course……

Chrom,

The entire aim of the missions was to get accurate information on the most valuable targets.. precisely those which would have been surrounded by multiple sites covering the target and approaches in depth and breadth.
So whilst there is no doubt that the route planning took the most advantageous route (as known at the time of planning the mission) there is little scope to imagine the route did not take the SR within both types envelope. The flight path was basically a straight line across the prime areas… even allowing for the ‘stand off range’ of the sensors the sheer density of sites made avoiding all of them pretty impossible.

Agreed that the speed and height are the primary tools used to defeat the missiles…however from eye-witness reports the missiles were able to reach the altitude and be on the flight path…however they generally seem to detonate behind the a/c.

This tends to indicate a launch solution lagging behind actual a/c movement…due to speed and height but also I guess because the radars were given less time to calculate due to late acquisition. It seems inconcievable that the system could not cope with the height/ speed issue by then….but coupled with the RCS issue it would lead to assume that this defeated the system at the crucial moment.

Afterall its easy (!) to track a target, especially one trailing a huge ‘wake’ behind it…again it is realisitc to get a launch solution on that target.

It was clearly beyond the capabilites of the system to bring missile and airframe to sufficient proximity to cause damage…

To then go to assert that the RCS reduction played no role in that is completely unjustified….