SOCSOC, thats true, I’m sure, and I’m sure you know a good deal about it being in the USAF. Yet at times Brits do get really flabbergasted with some of the antiques – one example is the F-35.
And I guess right now a good part of the British population is blaming the US for dragging them into Iraq, what with all the “secrets revealed” dirty laundry flying around.
That’s precisely my point: the public and the politicians may not appear overly keen on the US of A at times, but the military to military contact is just as strong as it has always been, perhaps even more so.
In the end, I’d think the USAF would want its own plane monitoring.. Its almost an organizational / bureaucratic mindset and I’m sure you have had first hand experience of that.
That may well be true, and if there was an ELINT jet over there it wouldn’t suprise me if it just happened to be airborne on that day. But it has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of distrust of the British.
SOCIn what way does what you are saying differ from what I said? The F-12 could indeed carry out autonomous intercepts, but depended totally on the gorund based system to know when to get airborne and in which direction to head initially.
Because of the intended role, yes, but the aircraft by itself did not have to function that way by design. That is how they differed.
This is the massive difference between an interceptor and a air superiority fighter, which can be located in a CAP pattern and be selectively assigned targets from either ground based systems or AWACS. The F-12 was not capable fo the CAP mission…it was a ground alert, launched when the gronud based systems assigned a threat….
The F-12 could have performed a CAP, there was nothing preventing it from doing so save the comfort of the crew and the amount of nitrogen in the tanks.
In that regard they are different, yet with basic mission similarity.
That was most of my point.
How do you define ‘genuine’….range? Time at speed? And compared to what? Compared to the F-12 or the F-106? F-15… the notion changes depending on your yardstick. In terms of a/c that achieved operational status it was genuinely capable of that, in terms of what we know was possible then perhaps not….
Come on now, how far was a FOXBAT going to fly at Mach 2.83?
I doubt that the Tupolev was certified by Western certification requirements. Can you show me any prove?
Where did I say Western? It did receive a Soviet certificate of airworthiness prior to beginning passenger flights on Nov 1, 1977. That being said, however, I do recall reading somewhere that the jet was the first Soviet airliner to comply with Western airworthiness standards. That I’ll have to dig up.
SOCI think the US would still want their own plane there to monitor.. somehow the yanks don’t trust the limeys as much as is hoped 😉
Please, I’ve worked with individuals from numerous different nations including the UK (including some Ukrainian SOF types in Iraq, that resulted in a hugely hilarious tale involving the Mi-24), and despite what often gets played up in the press from the political side, there is a great deal of respect and cooperation from the military side of the house that often gets overlooked when people latch onto the latest BBC or CNN story involving political antics by one side or the other.
SOCSo it didn’t need speed at all…
It did need speed, speed and reduced RCS was seen as the key to defeating the blip-scan radar types.
What? The KAL shot down had just flown over some of the Soviet Unions most sensitive missile ranges and secret bases in the Kamchatka penninsula. It was thousands of kms off course deep in Soviet territory. They stuffed up most of the intercept and didn’t shoot it down till it was nearly leaving Soviet airspace, but it was an intruder. They get whined at from westerners about shooting it down and the same complainers laugh at them for not shooting down Rust. Personally I think they should have been consistent and shot down Rust too.
First off, they would have been fully justified in obliterating Rust had they seen fit to do so. They weren’t exactly unjustified in blowing up the KAL jet either, but in that case a better regimen of visual recognition training for the pilots involved may have been a good idea. Regardless, my point was that aircraft in international airspace were not necessarily outside the threat range of air or ground-based systems like the MiG-25 or S-200.
I have never read of any problems tracking an SR-71… only problems reaching it and that was due to speed.
And the lack of issues tracking it were due to newer radar technology. Meaning the efforts taken to defeat the blip-scan radar types were mostly irrelevant.
Why would the Soviets want the west to know it could shoot down its planes? That is the sort of thing you keep secret till you get an opportunity to do it for real.
Except that it wasn’t secret…
And I countered that flawed logic by pointing out that the SR-71 never flew against the Mig-25 directly in combat within the GCI network the Mig-25 was designed to operate within.
Never in wartime, but the Blackbird did frequently encounter MiG-25Ps, and they weren’t going to be there, let alone locking up a Blackbird, if they didn’t have GCI support. They probably could have shot at one on numerous occasions, and then the argument would transfer to the effectiveness of the SR-71A’s ECM suite against the R-40’s guidance systems, because no Blackbird is going to outmaneuver anything short of perhaps a bloated A-380!
Of course some like to suggest that the Mig-25 can’t intercept mach 3 targets because the closing speed was too high ignoring the fact that it was designed for the role of intercepting mach 3 plus targets.
That tends to be due to an overwhelming ignorance of the fact that the FOXBAT was developed specifically to solve the potential problem of OXCART overflights…
The F-12 needed initial guidance from the ground based systems.. it was not designed to carry out cap missions…
So as I said the basic mission was guided by ground based systems. Sure once it was airborne the intercept could be carried out autonomously, but it would not have been airborne unless a ground based system had detected a target. In that regard the MiG and F-12 are similar.
Apples and oranges…the AN/ASG-18 was capable of operating outside of a GCI network, and could locate targets autonomously, while the MiG-25P needed GCI inputs to perform an intercept. Therein lies the difference.
I would also argue that the supersonic cruise capability of the 25 qualifies it for long range high speed intercepts.
And I’d argue that the thirstiness of the MiG-25’s powerplants at obnoxious levels of speed would have precluded it from genuine long-range intercepts at said obnoxious speeds well in excess of Mach 2.
The Concorde was certified by civil aviation rules to be used for commercial flying.
So was the Tu-144 😀
SOCBoth designed to intercept airborne targets, with a quick (ish) reaction time and over long distances. Both relied on ground based long range radar systems providing them with overall mission guidance, albeit with differing command and control philisophies, neither one designed for CAP work or mobile (as in moving with a land operation) use…
Actually, the F-12 was to be the first interceptor capable of operating autonomously outside of SAGE, not requiring any ground inputs to make an intercept. And the FOXBAT being intended for long-range intercepts? Not at speed…
The Tu144 needed that next generartion of engine to begin to match the pre existing Concorde performance, by then it was too late, both in technical terms and economic terms. To me that represents a level of ‘failure’.
We can discuss the Tu-144 in a different thread, suffice it to say that I do not regard the Tu-144 as being inferior to the Concorde!
We are not talking about potential, but proven capabilities.
Hence not getting into it here 😀
The fact that there was no problem tracking this aircraft whether they spent billions or trillions making it stealthy does not make it a stealth aircraft.
The aircraft was designed with reduced RCS in mind. Against certain radars it would have been damn near invisible, and it did have features to give it reduced observability against other radars as well.
why did it need to fly so fast…
That was part of the self-defense concept to defeat the blip-scan style radar systems. Tomorrow when I am not in the office all day I’ll explain to everyone just what the blip-scan concept was and why the A-12 was an ideal design suited to defeating it. That should clear a lot of this up.
The same way those Bears evaded those Typhoons… by flying in international airspace.
Tell that to the KAL flight…espionage aircraft were not necessarily safe just because they were in international airspace. Ergo, threats were not explicitly avoided.
What we have problems with is that if the SR-71 is this invisible stealth plane WTF did they spend so much money on the B-2 for?
Nobody claimed it was invisible (nobody sensible, at least), just that it was designed with reduced radar observability in mind. Which was rendered less effective by the use of newer radar signal processing technology and the like. Like I said before, you can track the B-2 apparently using bistatic radar systems, right? So is the B-2 still a stealth aircraft? You would have to at least agree that it was designed as such, which is the same point I’m trying to make about the A-12.
Just put bombs in the SR-71, reduce its cruise speed by half to increase its range and allow for a decent bomb load and they are ready.
One concept involved AGM-69s…which would have a reach of around 500 miles when fired from speed and altitude.
That is strange, because others here are suggesting that the only warning you get is the sonic boom.
And they’d be wrong in most situations.
SOCI should think that it was the S-200 SAM that was the main deterrent for the SR-71, it could probably shoot down one alright, but the MiG-25 couldn’t.
The S-200 was initially conceived to hit high, fast targets moving at 3500 km/hr out to 150 km, and targets at 2000 km/hr out to 200 km. The Blackbird was a likely target, but the primary role, based on Russian-language material I’ve obtained, seems to have been strategic defense. They state that Hound Dog was a target, as well as bombers. There was also the national-level ABM system role that I discuss on my blog in the ABM article.
After all, no aircraft ever shot down a U2 spy plane – only surface to air missiles.
No aircraft with the right combination of weapon system and altitude performance ever had a chance to get one.
Robert McNamara could have been the best “PVO commander” the Soviets never had!!
Why not, he was a poor SecDef 😀
Sorry, my sentences must have been poor
Or my comprehension may have been off.
And the exhaust out the back end.
True!
Its still a very small niche market, if both had come to enter service, they would undoubtedly have taken sales from each other.
Yeah, but you have to consider that back then when order books were being filled, they didn’t think it was only going to be a small niche market!
SOCI’m not saying it wasn’t.
Sounded like it…
I am saying, in practice, it was not a stealthy aircraft as it was easily detectable.
That is the same thing I’m saying. It was designed as such, but in practice it ended up not being that effective due to improvements in Soviet radar technology.
Ach Sean….
Not a direct competitor? How many other SSTs were there in the western market at the time? 🙂
Is the 737 a direct competitor to the 747? Similar aircraft performance data, but different “markets”. The B2707 was a nearly 300 passenger jetliner. You don’t buy a 747 when a Learjet will suffice, do you?
Yeap, as a concept no doubt it was great – bigger, faster, further… but marketing (and some pollyticians too) were making promises no engineer could keep.
Oh they would have kept them, but the accountants? Those guys would have been more than a little irate…
The concorde was scuppered by the laws brought in dealing with SSTs over land. Indeed, to this day, the biggest obstacle facing SST development is getting a clear answer from governments around the world what constitutes acceptable overpressures.
The Concorde also wasn’t helped by the rampant increase in oil prices in 1973 that led t oan awful lot of order cancellations, either.
SOCIf we look a the 25 interceptor versus the YF-12 say….one can argue that overall the 25 was the more verstaile, robust and ‘valuable’ airfrmae to have, whilst the YF-12, inspite of its potential performance and avionics advantages was far more limited in what it could achieve against aerial targets. So even if the YF-12 had been deployed it would not have had the robustness of the Mig 25 platform… which could be seen as a disadvantage.
Now you’re falling into your own trap: the FOXBAT and the F-12 were not intended for the same mission profiles, so they can’t be compared either…
In terms of long term supersonic cruising Concorde still shows the way home… in both time spent supersonic without refuelling and hence range as well as ‘economy’ of means (!) , dry thrust; M2.02 sustained speed. Pretty impressive to be sure. But again its primary goal was to achieve that, had it not it would have been even more limited, much as the Tu 144 was limited.
The XB-70 was quite capable of long-range, unrefuelled supersonic cruise at Mach 3+ as well. And how exactly was the Tu-144 limited, except for the fact that it had to wait for the definitive RD-36-51A turbojets?
SOCI am not sure the Foxhound can do, or the B-1.
Both can. Even the B-1B has retained an extended supersonic dash ability, albeit at about half the speed of the B-1A.
Always funny is the supersonic bomber role: with Mach 2 at 70000ft even a tactical nuke is hard to aim, not to speak of conventional bombs.
Actually, the MiG-25RB’s bombing system was supposed to be pretty accurate. Not precision-level, but still pretty damn accurate.
Arrogant posts =/= Knowledgeable posts.
And yet, the Blackbird was still designed as a low-RCS aircraft, a fact that people don’t want to deal with for some strange reason…
That was a key reason in the failure of the American SST program (being American, it had to be bigger, better and faster than everyone else – physics didn’t cooperate though)
The B2707-200 was to be bigger and faster because it was not intended to be a direct competitor to the Concorde, which had already secured (and later lost) a host of orders from various airlines and was much farther along in the development process. It was supposed to be made of steel and titanium, which did help to drive the cost right up.
Also, there were 6 aircraft commited to by both British Airways and Air France. Looks like at least some Europeans saw merit in the concept at one point.
SOCA plane flying at mach 3.4 can’t turn rapidly to evade interception
I think the Blackbird’s turn radius at speed was around 80 miles! Interestingly though, the F-12 was credited with a quicker “re-attack” time than the F-106 due to the high speed, despite the exorbitant display of supersonic nonmaneuverability.
Exactly which strike mission used SR-71s? The Mig-25 did those things or was at least capable of doing those things, but no operational SR-71 model was.
I’ve heard rumors about a potential strike capability, which I won’t get into here.
I am sure they were sophisticated for the time, but the result made it pointless. At no time did the Soviets or anyone else have trouble detecting and tracking the SR-71 from very long range.
I already explained that, it had a lot to do with changes in the way the Soviets were building radar systems. If you understand what a high-speed, reduced-signature design would have done to a blip-scan radar system, you’ll see that they were thinking logically, but technology overtook the program as it turned out.
Yeah, SA-2s designed to shoot down B-52s that were already compromised technology and jammable. Big deal. When was an SR-71 flown over an operational S-300 site.
I don’t think the S-75 was compromised in 1959 when the A-12 was conceived…and by all means, feel free to try overflying an S-300 site, I wouldn’t 😀 The S-300 is irrelevant anyway as it was a much later system.
But even with all that development work it wasn’t flown at its expected design speed on its first flight.
Which was kinda my point…
Actually the Mig-25 is comparable because unlike most modern supersonic aircraft it is actually intended to fly at multiple mach speeds for a large portion of its normal operation. Mach 2.3 might sound pathetic compared to figures given for the F-15 and indeed the figures given for the F-111 but the Mig-25 could fly as long as it liked at mach 2.3 without problems. Not many other aircraft can manage even that.
Apart from the SSTs, the only other supersonic extended-cruise airframes I can think of were the T-4, Blackbird, FOXBAT, FOXHOUND, XB-70, Tu-160, and B-1.
The S-75 was designed to engage B-52s, not highflying high speed SR-71s. By the time the SR-71 came into the radar scope of the S-75 the S-75 was a known entity.
Russian-language historical source material I’ve been researching for various reasons describes the S-75 as being a complement to the S-25 initially, not targeted at any specific target set. Indeed, the altitude envelope of the weapon was expanded in a later variant of the missile to counter the U-2.
Look forward to reading your reply to Sens as he also replied that the exhaust plume did not effect RCS.
Tell that to Lockheed.
The first real stealth aircraft that could be tracked from thousands of kms away. Yeah right. There are plenty of claims of missile locks from Mig-25 pilots. The system can’t lock what it can’t track and it wont lock something outside the missiles launch parameters. Kinda clear evidence it wasn’t stealthy. The IRST of the later interceptor Mig-25s could detect an SR-71 head on from 120km.
The aircraft was designed with reduced radar signature in mind. Contrary to what some people feel like believing, that is in fact where the chined fairings originated, for one. The RAM treatments and canted fins were also a byproduct of the A-12’s redesign to meet the CIA’s low signature goals (the original iteration wasn’t quite up to par). So it ended up not being effective as conceived due to newer radar systems, so what? You could make the same argument against the B-2 with regard to bistatic radar systems in certain wavelengths, but that in no way changes the fact that the B-2 was conceived as a low-RCS design either. Some aspects of technology may have caught up with it, that’s all. And the IRST? No suprise there!
the only thing that stopped the SR-71 from being shot down was its speed and the fact that it avoided any threat that could actually successfully engage it.
Not true. If it avoided anything that could intercept it, how do you explain visual sightings by FOXHOUND pilots or reports of FOXBAT pilots of getting missile lock-ons…
SOCTupolev is blaimed for killing more than one project with his behind-the-curtain games.The end result is 1.3 billion rubles spend with plane “trown” in the garbage.
I think the aircraft that Tupolev may have gotten canned was the improved T-4MS design?
I also know that statement and maybe that is the case,but i think that there was allways anti-supersonic bomber task.That is said by ex-soviet pilot when i asked him what is the prime target desribed in the manual for PVO MiG-25’s.
The anti-supersonic bomber mission may have been rethought when the supersonic B-1A was still a viable project, but it was still originalyl conceived as a counter to the A-12. SAMs had brought down the U-2 finally, but the A-12 was going to be a much different problem.
Fact is that no other PVO MiG-25 user beside USSR can use the plane properly.
With the more extensive and capable GCI network in the former USSR, I can agree with that.
The same crap like “Bagdad was the most heavily defended city”.
That one isn’t crap…Blackbirds were fired at on many occasions, and none were shot down. Proved the concept worked against at least the S-75, which the Vietnamese and North Koreans tried to hit the jet with on a number of occasions. Not sure if anyone tried to shoot an S-200 at the Blackbird (Libya maybe?) however. But the fact remains that none of the SAMs shot at the aircraft ever managed to bring it down, you have to credit the design for that. It was designed when the S-75 was he primary SAM threat, and it defeated it on every occasion.
SOC[color=red]Grow up and quit insulting people for not having pristine spelling habits, will you? Continuing to insult someone who is trying to have a discussion is grossly moronic and will result in some time off for the next offender.[/color]
SOCThe same happened to a 74 Squadron Phantom FGR2 over Aberporth range in 1992 when a Skyflash took a lump out of the port intake after the phantom had lauched it. As the RAF Phantoms were on the verge of being phased out the aircraft was cat 5’d at Valley and was burnt on the fire training dump there a couple of years later.
Something similar happened to my dad, who was a USAF F-4 pilot early in his career. He actually earned the call sign “Maverick” over the incident, well before Tom Cruise 😀 An AGM-65 fired from his aircraft at low level detonated on the target and either a piece of the target or a piece of the missile was granted enough kinetic energy by the explosion to make the journey back up to the offending Phantom and take a chunk out of it. Amusingly, nobody apparently noticed the hole in the jet until post-flight insepctions were conducted!
SOCT-4 is not response to the Valkyrie.It was designed for anti-ship use.
Which is one of the interesting historical notes about this fascinating project that gets forgotten! The T-4 was the first attempt to produce a high-speed carrier killer, the in-service result of which eventually became the Tu-22M. Advanced technology, rising costs, and a desire for Sukhoi to direct most of their attention to the T-10 project resulted in the cancellation of the T-4.
And MiG-25 was designed to deal with M2+ bombers like the Valkyrie,no just against one reconnaissance aircraft.
Rostislav Belyakov stated that the MiG-25 was conceived as the response to the Lockheed A-12. One has to remember that the A-12 was a black program until the early 1980s, so Western assumptions that the latest Soviet high-speed interceptor was a counter to the B-70 program can be forgiven to an extent.
The main purpose of the SR-71 was surely to spy on the USSR the same way its predecessor the U-2 did.
A-12 yes, SR-71 not so much. The USAF Blackbird had a good ELINT fit and a quality SLAR allowing for espionage flights without the need to actually overfly the USSR. Amusingly, during the NICE GIRL flyoffs, it was found that the A-12 actually had the better internal camera fit for overhead reconnaissance.
China was reportedly tracking SR-71s from takeoff in Thailand to landing in Japan and passing that information to Vietnam.
I believe you’re thinking of the Chinese alerting the DPRK to A-12 overflights.
How fast was the SR-71 flown on its first few flights…
Bad comparison. While the first SR-71A went past Mach 1 on its first flight, a lot of the development work was already done on the A-12. The A-12, by comparison, took a week to get to Mach 1 but a good bit longer to finally hit Mach 3. This was, however, due in part to not having an A-12 fitted with two J-58 engines until five months after the first flight. Once that occurred, it took about another 6 months to get to Mach 3 due to issues with the inlets and envelope expansion with the new engine configuration. The T-4 only hitting just over Mach 1 during its limited test career was nothing to be ashamed of.
if it had flown any where near its top speed on its first flight the makers of the T-4 should have been shot.
For comparison, the XB-70 went past Mach 1 on its third flight and Mach 2 on its eighth flight. The first jet did have some issues so Mach 3 did take a while to hit.
It should still be in service, but of course cost kills everything…
It might still be very useful over Iran or North Korea, but anything else is not very advisable. New, modern SAMs like the S-300P series would be able to down a Blackbird.
i read somewhere that the exhaust plume(ionized gas) of the SR-71 had a very large RCS. Because of the large RCS, ample time would be given to the enemy to hide sensitive assets before SR-71 can overfly the intended targets. Airport civilian radars can detect the SR-71s at hundreds of miles away.
Is there any truth to this?
The exhaust plume was found to have a considerable effect on the RCS, yes. Look at some of the A-12 RCS pole models. They were fitted with large fairings behind the engine pods to simulate the engine exhaust once it was discovered that it was rather reflective. The A-12 was designed to use high-speed and low RCS to defeat “blip-scan” type radars used by the USSR. The BAR LOCK series introduced newer scanning types and better processors that negated a lot of the advantage the A-12 would have had. Speed and altitude still kept it protected over North Korea and Vietnam, however.
Would someone have had time to hide a lot of assets? Maybe, maybe not. The jet was still stupid fast and could cover a lot of ground with serious quickness. You might know it was coming (although a lot of North Korean and Vietnamese overflights by the A-12 gave absolutely no indication that they knew the A-12 was there, but a lot of them showed definite signs that the jet was being tracked or even fired upon; the A-12s ELINT fit is just now being seriously declassified and was far, FAR more extensive than anyone thought previously), but it still might pick up signs that you were hiding things if it didn’t manage to image them outright.
There is no comparison as both were designed for different missions, and one couldn’t do the mission of the other.
What people fail to comprehend is that the MiG-25 was a Mach 3 dash aircraft at best, while the Blackbird was a Mach 3 cruise aircraft. That alone explains a lot of the performance differences between the aircraft.
Also the XB-70 was a prototype from the onset and with this fact in mind that it wouldn’t see service, many issues that plague an intended operational design could be evaded.
The XB-70 program was originally intended to encompass three aircraft, with AV/3 featuring a working weapons bay, the four-man cockpit, and a prototype of the weapons system. Yes, it was relegated to a two jet research program in 1961 before the first aircraft even rolled out in 1964, but there were still efforts to produce the RS-70 variant for a bit. NAA did a lot of work on signature reduction and defensive systems to that end, although none of this was trialled on the test aircraft. In truth there weren’t that many issues that plagued the XB-70 program. AV/1 was a little more problematic, but AV/2 had different design features in some areas and until it crashed because of an F-104 mid-air collision had a relatively benign flight test program.
Please show me any aircraft that went into USAF inventory that started with an X designation?
XP-86, XF-104, XB-29, XB-36, XB-47, XB-52 and for the USN, XF9F-2, XF9F-9, XFJ-1, XF2D-1, XF8U-1, XA3D-1, XA4D-1.
Which flew after the YB.
But both prototypes were conceived and originally built as XB-52s. The second jet was redesignated YB-52 after installation of some service test gear, but it did begin as the second XB-52.
Was the MiG -25 regarded as a successful interceptor?
Why not? The B-52 can be regarded as a successful nuclear bomber, but it never dropped an atomic or thermonuclear weapon in anger. You’d better be glad that the MiG-25 was never afforded the opportunity to prove itself in the PVO, because we all know what that would’ve probably meant!
It did have a long career as a reconnaissance and SEAD aircraft as well, and served India just fine as a recon jet for many years. OK, the interceptor had a number of flaws, but it did remain in service for quite some time. Iraq wasn’t able to really effectively use it in the 80s or 90s, but that was a far cry from the USSR.
as soon as it entered service the Soviets were already working on its replacement (MiG-31).
FOXHOUND was intended to do things that the MiG-25 couldn’t, namely locate and destroy low-flying and low-RCS targets, in particular cruise missiles.
SOCDear All,
Am I correct in thinking that the vast majority of Sigint and Elint is gathered by satellite these days?
No. Aircraft like the RC-135 and a host of other land- and air-based platforms are used to gather ELINT and SIGINT.
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