The pilot who stole a secret Soviet fighter jet

On 6 September 1976, an aircraft appears out of the clouds near the Japanese city of Hakodate, on the northern island of Hokkaido. It’s a twin-engined jet, but not the kind of short-haul airliner Hakodate is used to seeing. This huge, grey hulk sports the red stars of the Soviet Union. No-one in the West has ever seen one before.

The jet lands on Hakodate’s concrete-and-asphalt runway. The runway, it turns out, is not long enough. The jet ploughs through hundreds of feet of earth before it finally comes to rest at the far end of the airport.

The pilot climbs out of the plane’s cockpit and fires two warning shots from his pistol – motorists on the road next to the airport have been taking pictures of this strange sight. It is some minutes before airport officials, driving from the terminal, reach him. It is then that the 29-year-old pilot, Flight Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, announces that he wishes to defect.

It is no normal defection. Belenko has not wandered into an embassy, or jumped ship while visiting a foreign port. The plane that he has flown 400-odd miles, and which now sits stranded at the end of a provincial Japanese runway, is the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25. It is the most secretive aircraft the Soviet Union has ever built.

Until Belenko’s landing, that is.

The West first became aware of what would become known as the MiG-25 around 1970. Spy satellites stalking Soviet airfields picked up a new kind of aircraft bring tested in secret. They looked like enormous fighter planes, and the West’s militaries were concerned by one particular feature; they sported very large wings.

A large wing area is very useful in a fighter plane – it helps generate lift and it also decreases the amount of weight distributed across the wing, which helps make it more nimble and easier to turn. This Soviet jet seemed to combine this ability with a pair of enormous engines. How fast could it go? Could anything in the US Air Force or other militaries keep up with it?

There had also been glimpses in the Middle East. In March 1971, Israel picked up a strange new aircraft that accelerated to Mach 3.2 – more than three times the speed of sound – and climbed to 63,000ft (nearly 20 kilometres). The Israelis, and US intelligence advisors, had never seen anything like it. Following a second sighting a few days later, Israeli fighters scrambled to intercept the aircraft but couldn’t even come close.

In November, the Israelis ambushed one of these mysterious intruders, firing missiles head on from 30,000ft below. It was a useless gesture. Their unidentified target streaked past at nearly three times the speed of sound – so fast the jet was already out of the danger zone by the time the missiles exploded.

The Pentagon put two and two together, and came up with a Cold War crisis. They believed this jet was the same one that had been glimpsed from the satellite photos. They were suddenly presented with the prospect of a Soviet fighter that could outrun and out-turn anything in the US Air Force.

It was a classic case of military misinterpretation, says Stephen Trimble, the US editor of Flightglobal. "They seemed to overestimate its abilities on pure appearance,” he says, "from the size of the wing and the huge size of its air intakes.

"They knew it would be very fast, and also thought it would be very manoeuvrable. They were right about the first one, but not so right about the second one.”

What the US satellites had seen, and the Israeli radars had tracked, were versions of the same aircraft – the MiG-25. It was built as a reaction to a series of aircraft the US were preparing to bring into service in the 1960s – from the F-108 fighter plane to the SR-71 spyplane and the massive B-70 bomber. These aircraft all had one thing in common – they would fly at three times the speed of sound.

In the 1950s, the Soviets had largely kept pace with the leapfrogging advances in aviation. They had bombers that could fly almost as fast and as high as the American B-52. Their fighter planes – many of which were made by the MiG design team – rivalled their American counterparts, though their radar and other electronics weren’t quite so sophisticated.

But the technological leap needed to take an aircraft from Mach 2 to Mach 3 was an enormous challenge. And this is what Soviet designers would have to do, as quickly as possible.

Led by MiG’s brilliant Rostislav Belyakov, the design team set to work. To fly so fast, the new fighter would need engines pushing out colossal amounts of thrust. Tumansky, the leading engine designer of the USSR, had already built an engine they believed could do the job, the R-15 turbojet, which had been intended for a high-altitude cruise missile project. The new MiG would need two of them, each capable of pushing out 11 tonnes of thrust each.

Flying so fast creates enormous amounts of friction heat as the aircraft pushes against air molecules. When Lockheed built the SR-71 Blackbird, they built it out of titanium, which could withstand the enormous heat. But titanium is expensive and difficult to work with. Instead, MiG went with steel. And lots of it. The MiG-25 was welded together, by hand.

It’s only when you stand next to a MiG-25 – and there are several spending their retirement parked on the grass at some of Russia’s military museums – that you can fully appreciate just what a task it was. The MiG-25 is enormous. At 64ft (19.5m) long, it’s only a few feet shorter than a World War Two-era Lancaster bomber. The airframe needed to be this big to accommodate the engines and the enormous amount of fuel needed to power them. "The MiG-25 could carry something like 30,000lbs (13,600kg) of fuel,” says Trimble.

That heavy steel airframe was the reason the MiG-25 had such large wings – not to help it dogfight with US fighters, but simply in order to keep it in the air.

The MiGs were designed to take off and accelerate to Mach 2.5, guided to approaching targets by large, ground-based radars. When they were within 50 miles (80km), their own on-board radars would be able to take over, and they would fire their missiles – which, in keeping with the MiG’s enormous size, were some 20-feet-long (6m).

As a counter to the American Blackbird, MiG also built a reconnaissance version, which was unarmed, but carried cameras and other sensors. Without the weight of the missiles and the targeting radar, this version was lighter – and it could fly as fast as Mach 3.2. This was the version spotted by Israel in 1971.

But in the early 1970s, defence chiefs in the US knew nothing about the MiG’s capabilities – though they had given it the codename ‘Foxbat’. They knew it only from blurred photos taken from space and from blips on radar screens above the Mediterranean. Unless they could somehow get their hands on one, it seemed that the MiG would remain a mysterious threat.

That is, until a disillusioned Soviet fighter pilot hatched his plan.

(BBC)