8 ms·

The Soviet Union's Lethal MiG-25 Foxbat: A Business Jet?

66 points by aww_dang 5y ago

geocrasher 5y ago
An interesting look at an absolutely insane idea! The Foxbat was an interesting design because as the article mentioned, flying at Mach 3+ required essentially destroying the engines. The Foxbat was supposed to be able to catch the Blackbird, which is why it had giant engines and had skin with a high nickel content for enduring bursts to high Mach numbers. Even so, the Blackbird could crank it up to about Mach 3.4- the Foxbat didn't have a chance to catch it. One could wonder- did the MIG design bureau know this, and suggest the biz jet version as a way to save the project? Either way, it was a success for the Soviet Union if nothing else as a propaganda machine.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  Actually, the MiG-25 was designed to catch the XB-70 Valkyrie, which is why top speed and cost were the priority requirements. Speed because it needed to catch it, and cost because there had to be a lot of them built if they wanted to protect the entire territory from supersonic nuclear bombers. And it should've been able to catch the supposed mach 3.1 speed of the XB-70. The Valkyrie was cancelled of course, but the Soviet Union kept using (and selling) the jet.
  - quercusa 5y ago
    The remaining XB-70 would be reason enough to visit the US AF Museum (Dayton, Ohio) - it's a stunning plane. That said, the museum is easily worth two days.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    Oh, my memory did not serve me well in this case. Thanks for the correction! The XB-70 is an amazing aircraft.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    Didn't the XB-70 become the B-1?
    - icegreentea2 5y ago
      Kinda not really? The XB-70 cancellation left a hole (next generation strategic bomber) that was eventually filled by the B-1. But the initial B-1(A) was envisioned to be somewhat lower speed, but still fast (Mach 2), and specifically a low altitude penetrator (XB-70 was a high speed, high altitude plane). It then got reworked into the B-1B which is uh... weird role. It's even slower than the B-1A, somewhat more stealthy, and really supposed to be used as a cruise missile truck. Arguable how much value the B-1B really provided.
      - rjsw 5y ago
        The B-1B seems to be a really good smart bomb truck.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  Foxbat project predated Soviet knowledge of the Blackbird. High speed, high altitude intercept was a role they anticipated needing based on American bomber evolution (B-58 and planned B-70) and extrapolating from U-2. The Foxbat doesn't necessarily need to be as quick as its targets. In one way you could imagine the Foxbat as a gigantic first stage for missiles. Soviet missiles were technically capable of outspeeding even the Blackbird, but the challenge was the time and energy it took to get to altitude. High speed, high altitude interceptors could help mitigate those problems.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Indeed, if launched at a high enough altitude and velocity, something like the R-40 would have been significantly faster than the SR-71 at over Mach 4. The other part of the equation is that at high speeds such an aircraft would be an easy target - any serious evasive action would require it to slow down unrecoverably, or simply destroy it. Meanwhile, the massive heat signature would mean any use of ECM or stealth characteristics would be unlikely to succeed, as each plane carried both radar and infrared versions of these missiles. Most likely, unless the Soviet air defences didn't manage to detect the SR-71, it would have been shot down, which is presumably why it never overflew the USSR.
    - zip1234 5y ago
      The reason it didn't overfly was political. The Gary Powers incident being the main initiator of that policy. It overflew Vietnam and had loads of missiles shot at it by Soviet SAMs with Soviet SAM operators. Mainly it flew too fast and too high for those to hit it.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        As far as I'm aware, the MiG-25 is not a surface-to-air missile. There were no MiG-25s in Vietnam either. The SR-71 was fast enough to avoid surface-to-air missiles, but it was much too slow to avoid the air-to-air missiles carried by a MiG-25.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The MiG-25 doesn't need to be faster than the SR-71. It just needs to have a certain fraction of the speed to be able to intercept it at an angle. At the high altitudes and speeds the Blackbird would have to go to evade a MiG-25, it would have no hope at all of evading a missile.
  - MegaButts 5y ago
    > At the high altitudes and speeds the Blackbird would have to go to evade a MiG-25, it would have no hope at all of evading a missile. I thought the SR-71 was faster than missiles? https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/forget-stealth%E2%80%94-sr-71-blackbird-could-simply-outrun-missiles-120021 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/forget-stealth%E2%80%...
    - zip1234 5y ago
      Missiles are faster but start in a far disadvantaged position. The missile has to start from 0 speed and 0 altitude. By the time the missile is at speed and altitude, it is too late given the speed of the SR-71.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        SAMs have to start at 0 speed and 0 altitude. An R-40 launched from a MiG-25 would start at Mach 3+ and 30km altitude.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      From your own article: > In effect, by the time it took a SAM system could lock onto an SR-71 traveling at Mach 3 and launch a missile, the Blackbird was already moving beyond the effective range of the missile. It wasn't purely faster than the missiles, it was fast enough to get out of range of radar and tracking for ground based missiles and beyond the effective range of the missile before it could reach the jet. Fired from an already moving jet at altitude missiles would have a longer effective range as it would spend less fuel getting to speed and gaining altitude.
    - 5y ago
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  I seem to remember having read in a German print magazine (https://www.fliegerrevue.aero/ https://www.fliegerrevue.aero/) that Mig-25's stationed in East Germany (or was it Poland?) were supposed (and trained) to intercept incoming Blackbirds over the Baltic Sea, which could have theoretically worked even if the Mig would be slightly slower by using the right "approach path" and coming in behind the Blackbird in weapon range for a short time window.
dharmab 5y ago
"Mustard" did a video about this as premium content for Nebula subscribers: https://nebula.app/videos/mustard-the-mig25-business-jet https://nebula.app/videos/mustard-the-mig25-business-jet If you don't have Nebula, check out his main video on the fighter: https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o
- geocrasher 5y ago
  That is a surprisingly excellent channel. Great content.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Mustard is top-notch content, just their name is weird.
thrill 5y ago
"Da, comrade, to close the business deal you must think it in Russian."
- hackeraccount 5y ago
  Excellent call back.
renewiltord 5y ago
The page w/ photos linked from the article appears to be suffering some traffic slowdowns. Here are the images archived: https://archive.ph/GEp9S https://archive.ph/GEp9S https://archive.ph/7kpzV https://archive.ph/7kpzV https://archive.ph/8m4AC https://archive.ph/8m4AC And the article itself https://archive.ph/ekjAq https://archive.ph/ekjAq
cellularmitosis 5y ago
Fun fact: this jet was designed to survive an EMP by using vacuum tubes, one of which was the 6C33C. This tube was a Russian military secret until a Foxbat defected to Japan, who then invited the USA to "inspect" (completely disassemble) the plane. That tube lives on today among HiFi enthusiasts. https://blog.thetubestore.com/emp-its-np-for-the-6c33c-b-tube/ https://blog.thetubestore.com/emp-its-np-for-the-6c33c-b-tub...
- rob74 5y ago
  I think the EMP resistance was more of a welcome side effect, the main reason for using tubes was probably that tubes were a proven technology, while transistors were still new for aeronautic applications in the late 1950s/early 1960s when the plane was designed.
  - hwillis 5y ago
    Development started mid 1959, when transistor radios were already very widespread. It also used Nuvistors, which were only announced in 1959. Cars were being sold with transistor radios in 1955. Many planes worldwide at the time (eg cancelled BAC TSR-2) were using transistorized avionics, and for a cutting-edge jet tried-and-true is less of a priority than it would be in a strategic bomber or something. It seems like a very conscious choice to use only nuvistors and tubes in the whole system, particularly for such a powerful radar. They were much larger and needed much more cooling, which gets harder the faster you're going.
    - ben7799 5y ago
      Radar has high current/high voltage implications that may very well have favored tubes at that point. Not the same low power electronics. If the plane needed to have a high power radio transmitter tubes might have been superior at that time too. It was still pretty early in the history of the transistor and active radar and radio transmitters are very different than consumer radio receivers.
      - 5y ago
rob74 5y ago
Such military-civilian crossover projects seem to have been fairly common in the Soviet Union - one I remembered when reading this was the Tu-114, the fastest propeller airliner, which was derived from a bomber: > The Tu-114 used the basic wing, empennage, landing gear, and powerplants of the Tu-95 bomber, mated to a totally new pressurized fuselage of much larger diameter. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-114 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-114)
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The problem is that when you do that you usually end up sacrificing something for one case or the other. In the case of Russian planes, they weren’t ever really competitive on noise, fuel efficiency, range, or reliability. It’s why they (at least until recent events) switched overwhelmingly to Airbus and Boeing for civilian use.
jp57 5y ago
> The MiG-25 was a maintenance hog (not least because pilots and ground crews partook of its alcohol de-icing supply, leading to the nickname "The Flying Restaurant"). Leave it to the Russians to de-ice with vodka.
- dharmab 5y ago
  Was actually methanol, very dangerous: https://warontherocks.com/2015/09/boozing-through-the-soviet-afghan-war-was-more-horrifying-than-you-can-imagine/ https://warontherocks.com/2015/09/boozing-through-the-soviet...
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    So unlikely true, as they would have just gone to the cantine and used real vodka.
    - dharmab 5y ago
      Likely true for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan who would not have had access to alcohol otherwise.
  - robocat 5y ago
    > Boot polish, for example, would be spread on a hunk of bread, which was then toasted. The alcohol in the polish would soak into the bread; the polish itself would crisp on the surface of the toast. You’d scrape off as much as you could, then eat the bread. The same could be done with some ethanol-based toothpastes. Alternatively, take that polished bread, sit it on top of a glass of water over night, and then drink it, as a certain amount of alcohol will have infused it. How much alcohol would just evaporate in these scenarios? To me the above sounds unlikely, unless there is something I am missing?
    - trhway 5y ago
      all those are very edge cases. Normally anybody anywhere would easily make "braga" - a precursor to moonshine - you just need anything with sugar-like carbohydrate (bread, sugar, sweet fruits, berries or even cabbage, etc.) and a bit of yeast and in like 3 days you have it, a wine-like level of alcohol which is already consumable though taste isn't for everybody. If you have a couple hours more and several pots of varying size and access to a boiling heat (gas/electric stove, camp fire, etc.) you can make moonshine out of that "braga". In that Netflix Mars-flight show the most hard to believe to me moment was when supposedly experienced Russian cosmonaut failed to repair water filter and they were going to die because of this - a Russian cosmonaut would have known about "braga"/"moonshine" distillation and would have been able to build a distilling device out of anything like it had been happening across all the USSR back then.
jbay808 5y ago
> Still, while the idea sounds crazy now, it must have seemed possible in the heady 1960s when supersonic airliners were the holy grail of air travel. It was an era that spawned Europe's Concorde and America's abortive SST Given the context, the Tu-144 seems like a glaring omission here, and perhaps was one more reason why the government wasn't interested in a supersonic passenger MiG.
w0mbat 5y ago
We were making an educational CD-ROM at the BBC in London back in the mid 90s and it had a section about planes. It included some facts about MIG and their jets, which we needed to verify. We had a russian programmer on staff and he said "Oh, my cousin works for MIG, I'll just ask him.". So he uses his desk phone to call his cousin who designs planes or something at the MIG factory, they have a short conversation in russian, and he gets the info we need. Later that day, MI5 phones our boss to ask what the hell is going on, having intercepted the call. Apparently it looks really bad to make an international phone call to a secret russian military facility and talk in russian! We tell the MI5 guy on the phone the story, which luckily he believes, so it all turned out OK.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  > Apparently it looks really bad to make an international phone call to a secret russian military facility and talk in russian! I doubt MI5 would not be able to find anyone to translate it :) Also, if they really thought you were a spy they wouldn't have called your boss. They're not in the habit of tipping off spies. And I don't think there's anything illegal in the story anyway. You were getting info from the Russians, not the other way around. Perhaps they were fishing for more info to see if your Russian colleague could be recruited to obtain more info?
  - lumost 5y ago
    exact operational parameters of aircraft are a closely guarded secret as the exact numbers allow an opponent to train against the craft as well as develop countermeasures for it. I'd imagine that if MI5 saw that a random encyclopedia company could verify this info, they would be quite interested in getting more.
    - w0mbat 5y ago
      We were just fact-checking our fairly mundane page about MIG the company and the planes they had made, which was written from publicly available info at the time. No secret plane details were asked for or given. It's really good to go to primary sources if you can, you catch a lot of mistakes that way.
IMSAI8080 5y ago
"equipped with a passenger compartment providing basic comfort" You get a seat.
trhway 5y ago
>Western observers were amazed when MiG-25s flew over Israeli positions in the Sinai desert in 1973, at a speed of Mach 3.2. Only later did they learn that to fly at that speed, the Foxbat's engines had to be replaced after each flight. interesting that USSR kind of missed an opportunity here - it was the compressor that got damaged and thus switch to ramjet intake bypassing the compressor at those speeds, similar to SR-71, would have made that 3.2+ Mach a normal mode for MiG-25 (USSR did have 2.5 Mach ramjet missiles so the technology wouldn't be completely new)

66 points by aww_dang 5y ago

An interesting look at an absolutely insane idea! The Foxbat was an interesting design because as the article mentioned, flying at Mach 3+ required essentially destroying the engines. The Foxbat was supposed to be able to catch the Blackbird, which is why it had giant engines and had skin with a high nickel content for enduring bursts to high Mach numbers. Even so, the Blackbird could crank it up to about Mach 3.4- the Foxbat didn't have a chance to catch it. One could wonder- did the MIG design bureau know this, and suggest the biz jet version as a way to save the project? Either way, it was a success for the Soviet Union if nothing else as a propaganda machine.

TremendousJudge 5y ago
Actually, the MiG-25 was designed to catch the XB-70 Valkyrie, which is why top speed and cost were the priority requirements. Speed because it needed to catch it, and cost because there had to be a lot of them built if they wanted to protect the entire territory from supersonic nuclear bombers. And it should've been able to catch the supposed mach 3.1 speed of the XB-70. The Valkyrie was cancelled of course, but the Soviet Union kept using (and selling) the jet.
- quercusa 5y ago
  The remaining XB-70 would be reason enough to visit the US AF Museum (Dayton, Ohio) - it's a stunning plane. That said, the museum is easily worth two days.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Oh, my memory did not serve me well in this case. Thanks for the correction! The XB-70 is an amazing aircraft.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Didn't the XB-70 become the B-1?
  - icegreentea2 5y ago
    Kinda not really? The XB-70 cancellation left a hole (next generation strategic bomber) that was eventually filled by the B-1. But the initial B-1(A) was envisioned to be somewhat lower speed, but still fast (Mach 2), and specifically a low altitude penetrator (XB-70 was a high speed, high altitude plane). It then got reworked into the B-1B which is uh... weird role. It's even slower than the B-1A, somewhat more stealthy, and really supposed to be used as a cruise missile truck. Arguable how much value the B-1B really provided.
    - rjsw 5y ago
      The B-1B seems to be a really good smart bomb truck.
icegreentea2 5y ago
Foxbat project predated Soviet knowledge of the Blackbird. High speed, high altitude intercept was a role they anticipated needing based on American bomber evolution (B-58 and planned B-70) and extrapolating from U-2. The Foxbat doesn't necessarily need to be as quick as its targets. In one way you could imagine the Foxbat as a gigantic first stage for missiles. Soviet missiles were technically capable of outspeeding even the Blackbird, but the challenge was the time and energy it took to get to altitude. High speed, high altitude interceptors could help mitigate those problems.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Indeed, if launched at a high enough altitude and velocity, something like the R-40 would have been significantly faster than the SR-71 at over Mach 4. The other part of the equation is that at high speeds such an aircraft would be an easy target - any serious evasive action would require it to slow down unrecoverably, or simply destroy it. Meanwhile, the massive heat signature would mean any use of ECM or stealth characteristics would be unlikely to succeed, as each plane carried both radar and infrared versions of these missiles. Most likely, unless the Soviet air defences didn't manage to detect the SR-71, it would have been shot down, which is presumably why it never overflew the USSR.
  - zip1234 5y ago
    The reason it didn't overfly was political. The Gary Powers incident being the main initiator of that policy. It overflew Vietnam and had loads of missiles shot at it by Soviet SAMs with Soviet SAM operators. Mainly it flew too fast and too high for those to hit it.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      As far as I'm aware, the MiG-25 is not a surface-to-air missile. There were no MiG-25s in Vietnam either. The SR-71 was fast enough to avoid surface-to-air missiles, but it was much too slow to avoid the air-to-air missiles carried by a MiG-25.
sudosysgen 5y ago
The MiG-25 doesn't need to be faster than the SR-71. It just needs to have a certain fraction of the speed to be able to intercept it at an angle. At the high altitudes and speeds the Blackbird would have to go to evade a MiG-25, it would have no hope at all of evading a missile.
- MegaButts 5y ago
  > At the high altitudes and speeds the Blackbird would have to go to evade a MiG-25, it would have no hope at all of evading a missile. I thought the SR-71 was faster than missiles? https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/forget-stealth%E2%80%94-sr-71-blackbird-could-simply-outrun-missiles-120021 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/forget-stealth%E2%80%...
  - zip1234 5y ago
    Missiles are faster but start in a far disadvantaged position. The missile has to start from 0 speed and 0 altitude. By the time the missile is at speed and altitude, it is too late given the speed of the SR-71.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      SAMs have to start at 0 speed and 0 altitude. An R-40 launched from a MiG-25 would start at Mach 3+ and 30km altitude.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    From your own article: > In effect, by the time it took a SAM system could lock onto an SR-71 traveling at Mach 3 and launch a missile, the Blackbird was already moving beyond the effective range of the missile. It wasn't purely faster than the missiles, it was fast enough to get out of range of radar and tracking for ground based missiles and beyond the effective range of the missile before it could reach the jet. Fired from an already moving jet at altitude missiles would have a longer effective range as it would spend less fuel getting to speed and gaining altitude.
  - 5y ago
flohofwoe 5y ago
I seem to remember having read in a German print magazine (https://www.fliegerrevue.aero/ https://www.fliegerrevue.aero/) that Mig-25's stationed in East Germany (or was it Poland?) were supposed (and trained) to intercept incoming Blackbirds over the Baltic Sea, which could have theoretically worked even if the Mig would be slightly slower by using the right "approach path" and coming in behind the Blackbird in weapon range for a short time window.

dharmab 5y ago

"Mustard" did a video about this as premium content for Nebula subscribers: https://nebula.app/videos/mustard-the-mig25-business-jet https://nebula.app/videos/mustard-the-mig25-business-jet If you don't have Nebula, check out his main video on the fighter: https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o https://youtu.be/W1L1sU0uI0o

geocrasher 5y ago
That is a surprisingly excellent channel. Great content.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Mustard is top-notch content, just their name is weird.

thrill 5y ago

"Da, comrade, to close the business deal you must think it in Russian."

hackeraccount 5y ago
Excellent call back.

renewiltord 5y ago

The page w/ photos linked from the article appears to be suffering some traffic slowdowns. Here are the images archived: https://archive.ph/GEp9S https://archive.ph/GEp9S https://archive.ph/7kpzV https://archive.ph/7kpzV https://archive.ph/8m4AC https://archive.ph/8m4AC And the article itself https://archive.ph/ekjAq https://archive.ph/ekjAq

cellularmitosis 5y ago

Fun fact: this jet was designed to survive an EMP by using vacuum tubes, one of which was the 6C33C. This tube was a Russian military secret until a Foxbat defected to Japan, who then invited the USA to "inspect" (completely disassemble) the plane. That tube lives on today among HiFi enthusiasts. https://blog.thetubestore.com/emp-its-np-for-the-6c33c-b-tube/ https://blog.thetubestore.com/emp-its-np-for-the-6c33c-b-tub...

rob74 5y ago
I think the EMP resistance was more of a welcome side effect, the main reason for using tubes was probably that tubes were a proven technology, while transistors were still new for aeronautic applications in the late 1950s/early 1960s when the plane was designed.
- hwillis 5y ago
  Development started mid 1959, when transistor radios were already very widespread. It also used Nuvistors, which were only announced in 1959. Cars were being sold with transistor radios in 1955. Many planes worldwide at the time (eg cancelled BAC TSR-2) were using transistorized avionics, and for a cutting-edge jet tried-and-true is less of a priority than it would be in a strategic bomber or something. It seems like a very conscious choice to use only nuvistors and tubes in the whole system, particularly for such a powerful radar. They were much larger and needed much more cooling, which gets harder the faster you're going.
  - ben7799 5y ago
    Radar has high current/high voltage implications that may very well have favored tubes at that point. Not the same low power electronics. If the plane needed to have a high power radio transmitter tubes might have been superior at that time too. It was still pretty early in the history of the transistor and active radar and radio transmitters are very different than consumer radio receivers.
    - 5y ago

rob74 5y ago

Such military-civilian crossover projects seem to have been fairly common in the Soviet Union - one I remembered when reading this was the Tu-114, the fastest propeller airliner, which was derived from a bomber: > The Tu-114 used the basic wing, empennage, landing gear, and powerplants of the Tu-95 bomber, mated to a totally new pressurized fuselage of much larger diameter. (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-114 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-114)

bobthepanda 5y ago
The problem is that when you do that you usually end up sacrificing something for one case or the other. In the case of Russian planes, they weren’t ever really competitive on noise, fuel efficiency, range, or reliability. It’s why they (at least until recent events) switched overwhelmingly to Airbus and Boeing for civilian use.

jp57 5y ago

> The MiG-25 was a maintenance hog (not least because pilots and ground crews partook of its alcohol de-icing supply, leading to the nickname "The Flying Restaurant"). Leave it to the Russians to de-ice with vodka.

dharmab 5y ago
Was actually methanol, very dangerous: https://warontherocks.com/2015/09/boozing-through-the-soviet-afghan-war-was-more-horrifying-than-you-can-imagine/ https://warontherocks.com/2015/09/boozing-through-the-soviet...
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  So unlikely true, as they would have just gone to the cantine and used real vodka.
  - dharmab 5y ago
    Likely true for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan who would not have had access to alcohol otherwise.
- robocat 5y ago
  > Boot polish, for example, would be spread on a hunk of bread, which was then toasted. The alcohol in the polish would soak into the bread; the polish itself would crisp on the surface of the toast. You’d scrape off as much as you could, then eat the bread. The same could be done with some ethanol-based toothpastes. Alternatively, take that polished bread, sit it on top of a glass of water over night, and then drink it, as a certain amount of alcohol will have infused it. How much alcohol would just evaporate in these scenarios? To me the above sounds unlikely, unless there is something I am missing?
  - trhway 5y ago
    all those are very edge cases. Normally anybody anywhere would easily make "braga" - a precursor to moonshine - you just need anything with sugar-like carbohydrate (bread, sugar, sweet fruits, berries or even cabbage, etc.) and a bit of yeast and in like 3 days you have it, a wine-like level of alcohol which is already consumable though taste isn't for everybody. If you have a couple hours more and several pots of varying size and access to a boiling heat (gas/electric stove, camp fire, etc.) you can make moonshine out of that "braga". In that Netflix Mars-flight show the most hard to believe to me moment was when supposedly experienced Russian cosmonaut failed to repair water filter and they were going to die because of this - a Russian cosmonaut would have known about "braga"/"moonshine" distillation and would have been able to build a distilling device out of anything like it had been happening across all the USSR back then.

jbay808 5y ago

> Still, while the idea sounds crazy now, it must have seemed possible in the heady 1960s when supersonic airliners were the holy grail of air travel. It was an era that spawned Europe's Concorde and America's abortive SST Given the context, the Tu-144 seems like a glaring omission here, and perhaps was one more reason why the government wasn't interested in a supersonic passenger MiG.

w0mbat 5y ago

We were making an educational CD-ROM at the BBC in London back in the mid 90s and it had a section about planes. It included some facts about MIG and their jets, which we needed to verify. We had a russian programmer on staff and he said "Oh, my cousin works for MIG, I'll just ask him.". So he uses his desk phone to call his cousin who designs planes or something at the MIG factory, they have a short conversation in russian, and he gets the info we need. Later that day, MI5 phones our boss to ask what the hell is going on, having intercepted the call. Apparently it looks really bad to make an international phone call to a secret russian military facility and talk in russian! We tell the MI5 guy on the phone the story, which luckily he believes, so it all turned out OK.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
> Apparently it looks really bad to make an international phone call to a secret russian military facility and talk in russian! I doubt MI5 would not be able to find anyone to translate it :) Also, if they really thought you were a spy they wouldn't have called your boss. They're not in the habit of tipping off spies. And I don't think there's anything illegal in the story anyway. You were getting info from the Russians, not the other way around. Perhaps they were fishing for more info to see if your Russian colleague could be recruited to obtain more info?
- lumost 5y ago
  exact operational parameters of aircraft are a closely guarded secret as the exact numbers allow an opponent to train against the craft as well as develop countermeasures for it. I'd imagine that if MI5 saw that a random encyclopedia company could verify this info, they would be quite interested in getting more.
  - w0mbat 5y ago
    We were just fact-checking our fairly mundane page about MIG the company and the planes they had made, which was written from publicly available info at the time. No secret plane details were asked for or given. It's really good to go to primary sources if you can, you catch a lot of mistakes that way.

IMSAI8080 5y ago

"equipped with a passenger compartment providing basic comfort" You get a seat.

trhway 5y ago

>Western observers were amazed when MiG-25s flew over Israeli positions in the Sinai desert in 1973, at a speed of Mach 3.2. Only later did they learn that to fly at that speed, the Foxbat's engines had to be replaced after each flight. interesting that USSR kind of missed an opportunity here - it was the compressor that got damaged and thus switch to ramjet intake bypassing the compressor at those speeds, similar to SR-71, would have made that 3.2+ Mach a normal mode for MiG-25 (USSR did have 2.5 Mach ramjet missiles so the technology wouldn't be completely new)