On September 6, 1976, a plane appeared from the clouds in the area of the Japanese city of Hakodate on the northern island of Hokkaido. It was a twin-engined aircraft, but not as short-haul as one used to see in Hakodate. Its gray hull bore the red stars of the Soviet Union. No one in the West has ever seen such an aircraft.
When pilot Viktor Belenko fled 40 years ago, he did so in a mysterious Soviet plane, the MiG-25. The BBC has investigated the far-reaching consequences of one of the most intriguing events of the Cold War.
The plane landed on the concrete-and-asphalt Hakodate airstrip. He plowed hundreds of meters of land before stopping at the far end of the airport. The pilot got out of the cockpit and fired two warning shots from a pistol - motorists on the road near the airport unwittingly witnessed this strange event. A few minutes later, airport staff drove up to the pilot. It was then that the 29-year-old pilot, pilot-lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko from the Soviet air defense, announced his desertion.
But he was an unusual deserter. He did not go to the embassy or jump off the ship while visiting a foreign port. The plane on which he flew more than 600 kilometers and which ran aground at the end of a provincial Japanese runway was a MiG-25. The most secret aircraft the Soviet Union has ever built.
This is how he was before Belenko's escape.
The West first learned about the MiG-25 in the 1970s. Spy satellites observing Soviet airfields found that a new type of aircraft was being tested in strict secrecy. It looked like a giant fighter jet, and the Western military was concerned about one particular feature: the large, very large wings.
A large wing area is very useful for a fighter - it helps to generate lift and also reduces the weight distributed throughout the wing, which makes the aircraft more flexible and nimble. This Soviet jet seems to have managed to combine this ability with a pair of giant engines. How fast can it be? Could anything from the US Air Force or other military provide him with competition?
There were also interesting news from the Middle East. In March 1971, Israel observed a strange new plane that accelerated to Mach 3.2 - more than three times the speed of sound - and climbed to an altitude of about 20 kilometers. Israelis and American intelligence advisers have never seen anything like it. During the second observation several days later, Israeli fighters tried to intercept the plane, but did not even come close.
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In November, the Israelis ambushed one of these mysterious intruders by firing rockets from 10,000 meters. But it was a useless gesture. Their unidentified target flew past at three times the speed of sound - so fast that by the time the missiles exploded, the plane had already left the danger zone.
The Pentagon has declared a Cold War crisis. He believed that this plane was the same one that the spy satellites captured. Suddenly, a gloomy prospect spread before the American soldiers: Soviet fighters could catch up and overtake any object in the US Air Force.
Stephen Trimble, editor of Flightglobal, says this was a classic case of military misinterpretation. “They overestimated the aircraft's capabilities in terms of its appearance,” he says, “from wing sizes to gigantic air intakes. They knew that he could be very fast, and they also thought that he would be maneuverable. They guessed right with the first, but not quite with the second."
What the American satellites saw and the Israeli radars recorded were the same aircraft - the MiG-25. It was built in response to a series of aircraft that the US was preparing to enter service in the 1960s, from the F-108 fighter to the SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft and the B-70 bomber. All of these planes had one thing in common: they could fly at three times the speed of sound.
In the 1950s, the USSR confidently kept pace with the leapfrog advances in aviation. It had bombers that could fly as fast and high as the American B-52s. The fighters - many of which were built by the Mikoyan-Gurevich design team - competed with their American counterparts, although they were slightly inferior in radar and electronic components.
But the technological leap, which was to accelerate aircraft from Mach 2 to Mach 3, had to be colossal. And Soviet designers had to implement it as quickly as possible.
Under the leadership of the brilliant Rostislav Belyakov from MiG, the design group got down to work. To fly that fast, the new fighter had to generate an enormous amount of thrust. Tumansky, a leading engine designer in the USSR, has already built an engine that he believes could provide this - the R-15, designed for high-altitude cruise missiles. The new MiG would need two of these, and each could push out 11 tons of thrust.
Fast flight creates severe friction as the airplane pushes air molecules out. When Lockheed built the SR-71 Blackbird, it was made of titanium, which could withstand extreme heat. But titanium is expensive and difficult to work with. MiG decided to work with steel. A lot of steel. The MiG-25 was welded from steel by hand.
And only standing next to the MiG-25 - several of these can be found parked on the grass in some military museums in Russia - do you realize the magnitude of the task assigned to the MiG designers. The MiG-25 is huge. At 19.5 meters in length, it is only half a meter shorter than the Lancaster bomber of the Second World War. The glider had to be big enough to accommodate the engines and the huge amount of fuel needed to power them. The MiG-25 could carry about 13,600 kg of fuel, says Trimble.
This heavy steel glider was the reason for the existence of giant wings - they were not designed for air combat with American aircraft, but simply to keep it in the air.
MiGs were designed to take off and accelerate to Mach 2.5, targeting approaching targets with large ground-based radars. Within 80 kilometers, they turned on their own on-board radars and launched missiles - which, in accordance with the MiG's enormous dimensions, were about 6 meters long.
In contrast to the American Blackbird, the MiG also built a version of the reconnaissance aircraft, which was unarmed, but equipped with cameras and other sensors. Lacking the extra weight of missiles and targeting radar, this version was lighter and could fly at Mach 3.2. It was this version that was seen in Israel in 1971.
But in the early 1970s, defense bosses in the United States knew nothing of the MiG's capabilities - although they gave it the codename Foxbat. All they had were blurry photographs taken from space and flashes on radar screens over the Mediterranean. If only they could get their hands on the plane and find out what other pig they are planning to plant in the MiG …
And in this they were helped by a disappointed Soviet fighter pilot.
We are ours, we are the new world …
Viktor Belenko was an exemplary Soviet citizen. He was born immediately after the end of World War II in the foothills of the Caucasus. He entered military service and received the qualification of a pilot - a role that provided him with certain benefits and privileges compared to ordinary citizens of the USSR.
But Belenko was disappointed. A single father got a divorce. He began to question the very nature of Soviet society and whether America was really as evil as the communist regime had portrayed. "Soviet propaganda at the time portrayed you as a corrupted, rotten society that has broken through," Belenko told Full Context magazine in 1996, referring to Americans. "But I had questions."
Belenko realized that the huge new fighter he was training to fly could be his key to escape. It was based at the Chuguevka airbase in the Primorsky Territory, not far from Vladivostok. Japan was only 644 kilometers away. The new MiG could fly fast and high, but its two gigantic voracious engines meant that it could not fly far - clearly not enough to land at an air base in the United States.
On September 6, Belenko flew with other pilots on a training mission. None of the MiGs were armed. He had sketched a rough route in advance, and the MiG had a full tank of fuel.
After breaking a slender row, in a few minutes he was above the waves and heading towards Japan.
To get away from the Soviet and Japanese military radar, Belenko had to fly very low - 30 meters above the sea. When he was far enough in Japanese airspace, he lifted the MiG up to 6,000 meters so that it could be picked up by Japanese radar. The surprised Japanese tried to communicate with an unidentified aircraft, but Belenko's radar was tuned to different frequencies. The Japanese raised their fighters, but by that time Belenko fell again below thick clouds and disappeared from the screens of Japanese radars.
All this time, the Soviet pilot flew at random, retrieving maps from his memory, which he studied before escaping. Belenko intended to bring the plane to Chitose airbase, but the fuel was running out, so he had to land at the nearest accessible airport. As it turned out, it was Hakodate.
The Japanese could not even imagine what they were dealing with when the MiG made its unexpected landing. Suddenly, the Japanese were in control of a deserter pilot - and a jet plane that skillfully avoided Western intelligence services. Hakodate Airport has suddenly become a hive of intelligence activities. The CIA could not believe their luck.
The same MiG was exhaustively studied after it ended up at the nearest air base.
“By disassembling the MiG-25 and examining it piece by piece in a few weeks, they were able to figure out exactly what it was capable of,” says Trimble. The USSR did not build the "superfighter" that the Pentagon feared, and not the most flexible aircraft designed for specific tasks, says Roger Connor, Smithsonian aviation curator. “This MiG-25 was not very useful as a combat aircraft,” he says. "It was an expensive and cumbersome aircraft, not the most efficient aircraft in combat."
There were other problems as well. The Mach 3 flight created tremendous pressure on the engines. Lockheed with its SR-71 solved this by placing cones at the front of the engines that slowed the air down enough not to damage engine components. The air was then forced into the rear of the engine, helping to generate additional thrust.
The MiG turbojet engine generated thrust by sucking in air, which helped burn fuel. But at a speed of 3200 km / h, the situation changed radically. Excessive air force can cause the fuel pumps to overheat, which will dump more and more fuel into the engine. At the same time, the force from the compressors will be so great that it will suck in parts of the engine. The MiG could start devouring itself.
The MiG-25 pilots were warned never to exceed the speed of Mach 2.8; the Mach 3.2 seen over Israel in 1971 destroyed the aircraft's engines in the process, and the pilots were very lucky to return to base.
But the draining of the MiG-25 led the United States to develop the F-15 Eagle, an aircraft that would be fast and agile; this was supposed to be the MiG-25. However, forty years later, the F-15 is still in the making.
In retrospect, the MiG, which excited the West, turned out to be a "paper tiger". Its massive radar lagged behind US models by several years, since it used outdated vacuum tubes instead of transistors (however, this same technology made it immune to electromagnetic pulses from nuclear explosions). The giant engines consumed so much fuel that the MiG was surprisingly limited in range. He could take off quickly, fly in a straight line, also very quickly, and launch rockets or take a photograph. And that's all.
The MiG, which the Soviet Union hid from the rest of the world for several years, was partially reassembled and then loaded onto a boat to return to the USSR. The Japanese presented the USSR with an invoice equivalent to $ 40,000 for transportation costs and damage that Belenko caused to the Hakodate airport.
It soon became apparent that this MiG was unable to intercept the SR-71, one of the aircraft it was supposed to handle.
“The difference between the MiG and the SR-71 is that the SR-71 is not only fast, but it holds the marathon,” says Connor. - And the MiG is capable of sprinting. It's like Usain Bolt, except that Bolt will run a marathon slower than a marathoner."
These restrictions did not stop the MiG from building more than 1200 MiG-25s. This aircraft became prestigious for the pro-Soviet air force, which saw something great in the operation of the second fastest aircraft on Earth. Algeria and Syria still use them. India has used the scout model with great success for 25 years; and only in 2006 they were discontinued due to lack of spare parts.
The most impressive effect of the MiG-25 was the fear of it, says Trimble. “Until 1976, the US did not know that it could not intercept the SR-71, and this prevented them from entering Soviet airspace during this entire period. The USSR was not very fond of such visits."
Belenko himself did not return to the USSR with his partially dismantled fighter. The deserter was allowed to move to the United States - his American citizenship was personally approved by US President Jimmy Carter - where he became an aeronautical engineer and consultant to the United States Air Force.
The flaws of the MiG-25 and the appearance of the American F-15 spurred Soviet designers to come up with new projects. Trimble says this event ultimately led to the Su-27 series. This is the very aircraft the Pentagon feared in the early 1970s, fast and agile, and its new versions are perhaps the best fighters today, he says.
The history of the MiG-25 is not over yet. Its design was heavily redesigned, creating the MiG-31, an aircraft with cunning sensors, more powerful radar and engines. “The MiG-31 was the realization of what the MiG-25 was supposed to be,” says Trimble. The MiG-31 entered service several years after the end of the Cold War, and hundreds of these aircraft today patrol Russia's vast borders.
And there is something to patrol: so far not a single pilot has decided to escape and land the MiG-31 at a foreign airfield.
ILYA KHEL