An unexpected visitor at Hakodate...

November 2, 2016 2:32 PM

This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before.
posted by dfm500 (20 comments total)

Must have been funny to be the intelligence analyst watching while they finally took this thing apart. You've been obsessed with this thing for years, and it turns out of be this sort of semi-useless folly of a plane.
posted by selfnoise at 2:53 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have a copy of the book MiG Pilot, signed by Viktor Belenko. It was amazingly cool to receive as a young me during the late years of the Cold War.

I recommend it if anyone is interested in more of this story.
posted by Fleebnork at 3:30 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

The MiG-25 was almost as big as a World War Two-era Lancaster bomber

wait, wot

That's gigantic.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 3:44 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Presumably the inspiration for the movie Firefox which I thought was pretty good at the time, although I was 11 and may not have been the most critical film viewer.
posted by GuyZero at 3:45 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Jet fighters really screw with my sense of scale. MiG-25 is 64 feet long, the F-15 is 63'9", F-4 is 63', F-117 is 65'11", F-22 is 62'1".

The Lancaster is 69 feet long. Coincidentally, so is the B-2, although comparing the B-2 to other planes by length is a bit unfair.
posted by ckape at 4:29 PM on November 2, 2016

Yeah and a Lancaster has 7 or 8 crew members walking around whereas the MiGs have one or two in very cramped quarters.
posted by GuyZero at 4:34 PM on November 2, 2016

selfnoise: Semi-useless folly is probably overselling it. The MiG-25 is a solid interceptor. If you're the Soviet Union, and have a huge amount of territory and the possibility of enemy aircraft coming at you from almost anywhere on your borders, a big, stupid fast interceptor makes a lot of sense. It's also worth considering that the USAF is hardly a disinterested party when it comes to analyzing the potential of enemy aircraft and therefore the spending required to have fighters able achieve air superiority.
posted by Grimgrin at 4:51 PM on November 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

The length was close to the same but the Lancaster had a wingspan of 102 feet vs 46 feet for the MiG-25. Also 7377 Lancasters were built vs 1186 MiGs. It carried 14,000 pounds of bombs compared with only 8,000 pounds on the famous B-17 (12,700 of them were built). The Lancaster was homely but it was truly a machine that killed fascists.
posted by Bee'sWing at 5:46 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

It seems that I'm not the only person in the world that owned this game. Great article.
posted by Splunge at 6:44 PM on November 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

WWII was about the British and Americans believing German and Russian bullshit, and fielding stuff actually adequate to counter the imaginary super-weapons, in MASS QUANTITIES. The Cold War was about the Americans and Russians repeating that pattern while the rest of the world was like "Well, one of 'em is gonna go broke first."

(Gonna take a break here, and imagine France before the blitz with competent generals and politicians, and with a full-strength Panhard EBR armored cavalry and a Bugatti M100 fighter corps. Late-war Wunderwaffen is fun, pre-war superweapons actually on the books but too late are better.)

The Russians would do shit like fly the same bomber squadron six times over Red Square on the May Day parades, and the Americans would freak out, because these were the NEW bombers (they weren't) and the Russians had six times as many as we thought they did (they didn't.)

They did stuff like that to us all through the Cold War.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:51 PM on November 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Fascinating incident and no doubt the inspiration fo The Sinkiang Executive from 1978.
posted by Rash at 9:15 PM on November 2, 2016

Seems like they're still doing it, Slap.
posted by Harald74 at 1:44 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

and the Americans would freak out, because these were the NEW bombers (they weren't) and the Russians had six times as many as we thought they did (they didn't.)

And of course overestimating the enemy's strength has never been a career limiting move for Pentagon bureaucrats.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:31 AM on November 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

I can't recall, isn't one of the Migs called the "howler" or the "screamer" because of its extremely loud engines on takeoff? I've been looking around for a video but can't find it.

Anyway, the Cold War Soviet Aircraft Facebook page is pretty interesting.
posted by My Dad at 7:41 AM on November 3, 2016

Actually, the article didn't cover one other reason for the panic over the MiG-25: another US intelligence mistake. The CIA also had some information about the MiG-23, which is a much more conventional jet fighter/bomber, and which the USSR planned to produce in huge numbers. However, they got the MiG-23 mixed up with the 'Foxbat', so they thought that the Soviets were planning to produce this super-fighter by the thousands. (In my summer spent working in the Air & Space archives at the Smithsonian, I came across at least one article from the early 70's referring to the 'MiG-23 Foxbat'.)

Eventually they figured out that these were two different aircraft, the 'Foxbat' was identified as the MiG-25, and the MiG-23 was assigned the code name 'Flogger'. But that mix-up inflated the apparent danger and helped feed the capabilities requirement for the F-15 (which was designed to counter a threat that never really existed).

John Barron's book about Belenko, MiG Pilot, is an interesting read. (No, not that John Barron.). It mentions, among other things, that the engine coolant for the MiG-25 was basically pure ethanol, with the result that frequently the pilots would skip scheduled patrol flights. They'd fake the flight logs, have the ground crew dump the fuel they were supposed to have burned into the ground at the end of the runway, and then the pilots and flight crew would get drunk on the engine coolant.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 7:45 AM on November 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

Semi-useless folly is probably overselling it. The MiG-25 is a solid interceptor.

Yeah, it's not useless, it's just a dedicated air-defense interceptor. It's an analogue to the Lightning or F-106 or the abortive Avro Arrow, not air-superiority fighters like the F-15 or Su-27 family. It's job is to take off, burn like hell towards wherever the B-52s/Tu-95s are coming from, and shoot down big, unmaneuverable bombers without any fighter escort before they get a chance to kill millions of your countrymen. It's cruder than western aircraft in ways that are sensible given the USSR's good-enough-is-good-enough military tech philosophy.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:20 AM on November 3, 2016

But that mix-up inflated the apparent danger and helped feed the capabilities requirement for the F-15 (which was designed to counter a threat that never really existed).

Of course, so was the Foxbat. It had to go that fast to catch the XB-70, which never made it beyond prototypes. And the XB-70 itself was obsoleted by ICBMs before any of those prototypes flew.

The Cold War arms race is almost entirely built on this cycle of obsolescence. Lots of cool tech, almost all of it worthless by the time it got out the door.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:21 AM on November 3, 2016

it's just a dedicated air-defense interceptor

A Rapid Defensive Unit, if you will.
posted by whuppy at 9:54 AM on November 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

RDU Inflated Estimate?
posted by McCoy Pauley at 10:31 AM on November 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

I read that MiG Pilot book, and it was quite entertaining, setting up the narrative of Belenko's growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union, the circumstances of the plane's return to the Soviet Union (for the sake of detente, the United States didn't keep it, and shipped it back to Russia--in pieces, after the plane had been painstakingly disassembled and every part photographed before crating), and Belenko's amazement at the difference between Soviet propaganda about America and the reality. It also seems clear that the plane was useful, albeit in a very limited way; the avionics, which relied on vacuum tubes, were more EMP-resistant than Western avionics, and the article states that fear of the MiG-25 kept the SR-71 Blackbird out of Russian airspace for the early seventies.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:09 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]