MiG Pilot

by John Barron

  Meanwhile, dozens of American aeronautical, electronic, and metallurgical experts from the United States and elsewhere joined the Japanese in scientific exploration of the plane itself. The initial, critical task was to ferret out the explosive charges planted to destroy sensitive parts of the plane the Russians were determined no foreigner should ever see — the radar, fire control system, electronic countermeasures, computer, automatic pilot. With difficulty, the Americans located and removed the explosives — “something of a cross between a cherry bomb and a stick of dynamite.” Then the Japanese and Americans painstakingly removed the wings, horizontal tail fins, afterburners, and pylons and loaded them, together with the fuselage, into a giant U.S. Air Force Galaxy C-5A cargo plane. Some of the Japanese technicians lettered and strung on the fuselage a large banner saying, “Sayonara, people of Hakodate. Sorry for the trouble.”

  Soviet fighters still prowled the skies around Hakodate, and fearful that they might interfere, the Japanese cloaked the C-5A within a formation of missile-firing F-104s and F-4s while it transported the MiG to Hyakuri Air Base sixty miles north of Tokyo on September 25. There, in a large hangar guarded by Japanese soldiers, the real unwrapping of the “present for the Dark Forces” began. Some of the Americans had devoted much of their careers to dissecting captured or stolen Soviet equipment, and they, along with their Japanese colleagues, approached the hangar much in the spirit of eager archaeologists allowed temporary entry into a forbidden tomb full of rare and glittering riches which might be surveyed but not kept. They had to analyze swiftly and urgently, yet carefully and thoroughly, so the labor was divided among teams which focused day and night upon separate sections or components.

  As the entire MiG was disassembled and the engines, radar, computer, automatic pilot, fire control, electronic countermeasure, hydraulic, communications, and other systems were put on blocks and stands for mechanical, electronic, metallurgical, and photographic analysis, the specialists experienced a succession of surprises and shocks.

  My God! Look what this thing is made of! Why, the dumb bastards don’t have transistors; they’re still using vacuum tubes! These engines are monsters! Maybe the Sovs have a separate refinery for each plane! Jesus! See these rivet heads sticking out, and look at that welding!

  They did it by hand! Hell, the pilot can’t see a thing unless it’s practically in front of him! This contraption isn’t an airplane; it’s a rocket! Hey, see what they’ve done here! How clever! They were able to use aluminum! Why didn’t we ever think of that? How ingenious! It’s brilliant!

  The data Belenko supplied in response to the first quick queries also seemed surprising and, at first, contradictory.

  What is the maximum speed of the MiG-25?

  You cannot safely exceed Mach 2.8, but actually we were forbidden to exceed Mach 2.5. You see, at high speeds the engines have a very strong tendency to accelerate out of control, and if they go above Mach 2.8, they will overheat and burn up.

  But we have tracked the MiG-25 at Mach 3.2.

  Yes, and every time it has flown that fast the engines have been completely ruined and had to be replaced and the pilot was lucky to land in one piece. (That fitted with intelligence the Americans had. They knew that the MiG-25 clocked over Israel at Mach 3.2 in 1973 had landed back in Egypt with its engines totally wrecked. They did not understand that the wreckage was inevitable rather than a freakish occurrence.)

  What is your combat radius?

  At best, 300 kilometers [186 miles].

  You’re joking!

  I am not. If you use afterburners and maneuver for intercept, you can stay up between twenty-two and twenty-seven minutes at the most. Make one pass, and that’s it.

  We thought the range was 2,000 kilometers [1,240 miles].

  Belenko laughed. That’s ridiculous. Theoretically, if you don’t use afterburners, don’t maneuver, and stay at the best altitude, you can fly 1,200 kilometers [744 miles] in a straight line. But in practice, when we were ferrying the plane from base to base, we never tried to fly more than 900 kilometers [558 miles] without refueling. Check it out for yourself. I took off from Chuguyevka with full tanks and barely made it to Japan. You can calculate roughly how far I flew and how much fuel was left when I landed. (The point was convincing. Although Belenko expended fuel excessively during the minutes while at sea level, he used afterburners only briefly and otherwise did everything possible to conserve. Even so, of the 14 tons of fuel with which he began, his flight of less than 500 miles consumed all but 52.5 gallons.)

  What is your maximum operational altitude?

  That depends. If you carry only two missiles, you can reach 24,000 meters [78,740 feet] for a minute or two. With four missiles, 21,000 meters [68,900 feet] is the maximum.

  What is the maximum altitude of your missiles?

  They will not work above 27,000 meters [88,580 feet].

  Then you cannot intercept the SR-71 [the most modern U.S. reconnaissance plane]!

  True; for all sorts of reasons. First of all, the SR-71 flies too high and too fast. The MiG-25 cannot reach it or catch it. Secondly, as I told you, the missiles are useless above 27,000 meters, and as you know, the SR-71 cruises much higher. But even if we could reach it, our missiles lack the velocity to overtake the SR-71 if they are fired in a tail chase. And if they are fired head-on, their guidance systems cannot adjust quickly enough to the high closing speed.

  What about your radar?

  It’s a very good radar. Jam-proof. But it cannot distinguish targets below 500 meters [1,640 feet] because of ground clutter.

  A MiG-25 cannot intercept a target approaching below 500 meters then?

  It cannot.

  Maneuvering. Tell us about maneuvering. How many Gs can you take in a turn?

  If the tanks are full, there is so much weight in the wings that they will rip off if you try more than 2.2 Gs. Even if you’re almost out of fuel, anything above 5 Gs is dangerous.

  The Americans were stunned. Why, you can’t turn inside even an F-4!

  You can’t turn inside anything. It’s not designed to dogfight.

  Partially because the leaks to the press emanated from sources that had concentrated on individual facets of the aircraft rather than on the plane as a whole, published reports about what was being discovered in Japan were confusing and also contradictory.

  A Japanese investigator was quoted: “The comparison of the fire control system of the F-4EJ and the MiG-25 is like that of a miniaturized, modern, precision audio kit and a large old-fashioned electric Gramophone.”

  Newsweek reported:

  The Japanese experts who gave the plane a preliminary once-over were astonished to find the body and wings covered with spots of brownish rust. Clearly, the MiG wasn’t made of the strong lightweight titanium used in U.S. interceptors. But what was it made of? The Japanese pulled out a magnet, and a loud “thunk” confirmed their suspicions: The Foxbat was plated with old-fashioned steel.

  That was just the beginning…. The welding and riveting were sloppy. It appeared that the plane would be difficult to control in a tight turn, and that at top speed its missiles could be torn from the wings.

  Representative Robert Carr wrote a lengthy article suggesting that the Pentagon had deceived the American people by purposely and grossly exaggerating the might of the MiG-25:

  In fact, as a fighter, the Foxbat is barely equal to our 15-year-old McDonnell F-4 Phantom and it is hopelessly outclassed by our new generation McDonnell F-15 and General Dynamics F-16. Either of our two newer Air Force fighters can outclimb, outaccelerate, out-turn, out-see, out-hide and out-shoot the Foxbat by margins so wide that our expected kill-ratio advantage is almost incalculable. No U.S. F-15 or F-16 pilot need fear the Foxbat unless he is asleep, out-numbered or an utter boob.

  Yet some American experts examining the MiG-25 were described as awed by what they saw. One said aspects of the plane were “brilliantly engineered.” Another commented, “We thought it was a damned good plane, an
d that’s what it turned out to be. We’re belittling it because it’s unsophisticated or because it rusts. In fact, it can fly higher, faster, and with a bigger payload than any plane in the world.” Another: “The MiG-25 does the job well, at less than it would cost the U.S. to build an equivalent plane.” And another: “It is apparent that Soviet designers are efficient cost managers who use only as much quality as is needed to solve a problem. They seem to ask why go to the expense of developing something new when we have something proven and cheaper on the shelf. They could come over here and teach us something in the way of cost-conscious management and design.”

  What was the truth? Were all the furor and alarm over the years wholly unjustified? Was the MiG-25 a “clinker,” a “turkey,” a flying “Potemkin village"? Had the Pentagon, together with its allies in the aviation industry, conjured up a phony threat to extract money from Congress, as Representative Carr implied? Did not the gift from Belenko reassuringly prove anew the superiority of the West? If so, how had the Russians nonetheless produced an aircraft whose recorded performance exceeded in several ways that of our very best?

  The data collected in Japan, then analyzed by the Foreign Technology Division of the Air Force at Dayton, Ohio, and the reports of the ongoing interrogation of Belenko all were flowing into the office of Major General George J. Keegan, Jr., then chief of Air Force Intelligence. As the information was collated to form a single mosaic, clear and definitive answers emerged.

  They showed that the West had been badly mistaken in its perceptions of the capability, purpose, menace, and implications of the MiG-25. The misconceptions occurred because the West evaluated the MiG in Western terms and thereby adopted false premises, which only the arrival of Belenko corrected.

  Because the MiG-25 had been clocked and tracked flying at Mach 3.2 at 80,000 feet, the West assumed that the recordings reflected the plane’s actual operational altitude and speed. Because, employing Western methods, the design and manufacture of an aircraft with the capabilities imputed to the MiG-25 would require an extremely high level of technology, the West feared the Russians had attained such a level. Because modern Western aircraft are designed to perform multiple missions — to intercept, dogfight, bomb — the West assumed that the MiG-25 functioned as a fighter as well as an interceptor.

  But Belenko explained and his plane proved that the MiG-25 was not a fighter, not an air superiority aircraft designed to duel with other fighters. Against Western fighters, it would be, as Representative Carr claimed, virtually helpless. But the Russians never intended it to tangle with hostile fighters.

  Once the false premises were rectified and the true origin and mission of the MiG-25 understood, then scientific detective work gradually unveiled a picture not so comforting or reassuring.

  By 1960 the Russians had seen coming at them over the horizon a fearsome new threat in the B-70, which the United States was planning as the world’s fastest and highest flying bomber. To counter the B-70, they had to build rather quickly an interceptor of unprecedented capabilities, one able to achieve Mach 3 at 80,000 feet. The problem was formidable, and the Russians were too poor, materially and technologically, to adopt an American approach in trying to solve it.

  They lagged in metallurgy and particularly the exploitation of titanium, which although extremely expensive and hard to work with, is very light, strong, and heat-resistant. And the Americans deemed titanium or some more exotic metal essential to a high-altitude supersonic aircraft. The Russians lagged even more woefully in the technology of transistors, semiconductors, and integrated circuitry, the tininess, lightness, and reliability of which the Americans also considered essential. The only air-to-air missiles the Russians could count on in the foreseeable future would be big, heavy, and short-range.

  The Russians lacked the time and resources to develop all the new technology Western designers and engineers doubtless would have thought necessary for the type of interceptor required. So, having no other choice, the Russians elected to make do with what they had. They decided to use, instead of titanium, heavy steel alloy; instead of transistors, vacuum tubes; instead of sophisticated new missiles, those that were available.

  This meant that their aircraft would be extraordinarily heavy and could be propelled only by an engine of extraordinary power. But again, they could not afford the many years and billions that design and production of a new engine would demand. So they looked around for something already on hand.

  Some years before, the gifted Soviet designer Sergei Tumansky had perfected an engine to power an experimental high-altitude drone or cruise missile. Because of Soviet metallurgical difficulties, he had had to build a big, rugged steel engine, which gulped fuel ravenously. Yet the engine over the years had proved itself highly effective and reliable at altitudes of up to 80,000 feet. Therefore, the Russians decided to create their new interceptor by constructing an airframe around two of these powerful Tumansky engines.

  They realized that weight and fuel consumption would preclude the aircraft they were conceiving from maneuvering agilely as a fighter and from staying up very long. The plane could be expected only to climb at tremendous speed, like a rocket, fire missiles during one pass at the target, and then land. And that is all the Russians originally expected and designed the MiG-25 to do.

  For all their ingenuity in making use of old technology, the Russians recognized they could not avoid innovating some new technology. Old-fashioned vacuum tubes could not accommodate to the sudden and extreme changes in temperature occurring as the plane skyrocketed from the ground to the subfreezing upper air. No pilot, however able, could in the brief time allowed and at the speeds entailed make an intercept without elaborate guidance from the ground. The airborne radar needed to lock onto the target in the final stage of intercept would have to be invulnerable to jamming.

  While the Russians urgently concentrated on creating the new interceptor, American aerial strategy and planning suddenly and radically changed. For four years U-2 reconnaissance planes had flown over the Soviet Union with impunity, collecting enormous masses of military, scientific and economic intelligence through photography and electronics, and mapping the country so that it could be bombarded precisely in the event of war. Soviet fighters strained upward, vainly trying to shoot at the U-2 sailing above 60,000 feet, and each time fell back downward in futility. The Russians also had begun to fire surface-to-air missiles, but their guidance systems were not yet effective enough.

  On May 1, 1960, the Russians fired a barrage of missiles at a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers. As Belenko was told and as a reliable source affirmed to the United States, some of the missiles hit and destroyed at least one MiG pursuing Powers. But one also hit and downed the U-2. This celebrated incident, coupled with estimates of the future capabilities of surface-to-air missiles, forced a reappraisal of American strategy. Ultimately the Americans concluded that missiles eventually would be so lethal that Soviet air defenses could not be penetrated by high-altitude bombers. Penetration would have to be effected at very low rather than very high altitudes. Therefore, the United States canceled the B-70 bomber.

  However, the Russians, whether because of simple bureaucratic inertia, apprehensions that the Americans might reverse themselves, or for occult reasons of their own, proceeded to build the new interceptor. And their decision compounded the mystery of the MiG-25. For to the West, it did not seem logical that they would resort to enormous cost and effort to solve complex technological problems solely to guard against a threat that had been withdrawn.

  Years later, in Japan, the more closely and analytically the Americans and Japanese studied the MiG-25, the more clearly they saw how the Russians had overcome the basic and subsidiary problems at comparatively little cost. They, of course, had saved billions in research and development costs by duplicating the dependable old Tumansky engines and relying on steel rather than on titanium. But on those surfaces subject to intense friction and consequent heat, they had affixed strips of titanium. I
n areas not subject to friction or heat, they had saved more money and some weight by using plain aluminum — something then unthinkable in the West. The rivet heads, it turned out, protruded only in sections where the airflow would not cause any parasitic drag. The rivets, which seemed to reflect crudity of engineering, actually subtracted nothing from aerodynamic performance while they strengthened the plane.

  The Russians had brilliantly engineered new vacuum tubes, elevated outmoded technology to a new apex of excellence. They had integrated a superb automatic pilot and a good on-board computer through digital communications to a ground control system that guided the plane to the exact point of intercept. The pilot had merely to take off, turn on the automatic pilot, and await instructions to fire.

  Belenko reported that the MiG-25 radar had been described to him as jamproof, and examination confirmed the report. The radar was the most powerful ever installed in any interceptor or fighter, so powerful that it could “burn through” distractive jamming signals transmitted by attacking bombers. The limited range of the radar was irrelevant, for it was needed only to present ground controllers with a magnified image of the target during the last stages of intercept. The search radars that detected and tracked the target at long range were part of the ground control system.

  Belenko also stated that despite the disarray, drunkenness, and mutinous atmosphere rife in his regiment, the MiG-25 had been remarkably free of maintenance problems. The reason was that the plane had been designed with the objective of ease and simplicity of maintenance. A mechanic, with modest skills and training, could quickly check critical systems by inserting plugs from test trucks on the runway. All the components most likely to require maintenance were contained in a huge rack situated behind the cockpit. By turning a hydraulic valve, a mechanic could cause the rack to rise out of the plane, and by turning smaller valves, he could cause any separate component to rise out of the box for repair or maintenance.