TU-128 Showing off its sleek lines.
Every once in a while an aircraft comes along that makes you scratch your head and go "Just what
were they thinking when they built this?". The TU-128 is one of those aircraft.
Seriously, a "fighter" that's almost 100 feet long with a 57 foot wingspan that weighs close to 100,000 pounds fully loaded?
More like a bomber with air to air missiles, which is practically what it was. Once you get past the ludicrous size of this aircraft, it was built for a specific purpose and served it well enough to remain in service for almost 30 years.
Read on to learn more about this Cold War oddity.
The Soviet Union was a seriously big place. Parts of it were very remote and there was a lot of "nothing" between major cities. Likely targets for US bombers were protected by short range "point defense" interceptors, like the Sukhois we saw in a previous diary Sukhoi Interceptors.
What they needed was something to fill the gaps. Something with suitable range and endurance to patrol those big empty spaces.
So who do you go to for something like that? Mikoyan-Gurevich? Not hardly. MiGs of the time were tiny and practically out of gas when they took off. Sukhoi? Nope. Sukhois were big and fast, but didn't have much more range than a MiG. Time to think outside the box comrades - let's get Tupolev to build it!
Yes, Tupolev, the Soviet design bureau best known for making bombers and transports. Sort of like asking Boeing circa 1957 to build a jet fighter. They could probably have done it, but it wasn't really their thing.
TU-98 bomber prototype. Only one was built.
Fortunately Tupolev already had something to work with, their TU-98 supersonic bomber prototype. While the TU-98 never entered service, they were able to leverage the design into the TU-28 interceptor, which was later renumbered as the TU-128 or "Fiddler" in NATO-speak.
TU-128s on alert somewhere very cold. Many of these were assigned to defend the northern reaches of the Soviet Union.
Depending on which source you believe, it entered service sometime between 1961 and 1966. Just under 200 were built. All were assigned to the Soviet Air Defense force PVO Strany, literal translation "Anti-Air Defense of the Nation". None were ever exported to the Warsaw Pact countries and none ever were deployed outside the Soviet Union. It was designed for a single mission and it performed that mission right up until the end of the Soviet Union.
This gives you a good idea of just how large the aircraft and its R-4 missiles were.
The TU-128 was a monster of an interceptor. To get an idea of just how big it was, let's compare it to one of the larger US fighters, the F-4 Phantom II.
Length
TU-128 98 feet
F-4 63 feet
Wingspan
TU-128 59 feet
F-4 38 feet
Height
TU-128 23 feet
F-4 16 feet
Empty Weight
TU-128 55,116 lbs
F-4 30,329 lbs
Max Takeoff Weight
TU-128 88,185 lbs
F-4 61,796 lbs
Ha! We laugh at puny Western fighter! In Soviet Union we do things big!
So how are the numbers for this thing? Not too bad for the early 1960s. Sources are spotty for this aircraft but this is what I managed to dig up:
Engines - 2 Lyulka turbojets at 22,000 lbs thrust each in afterburner. Quite powerful, but they had a lot of airplane to move.
Top speed - around Mach 1.5
Service Ceiling - 50,000 to 65,000 feet depending on who you believe. The higher number is probably for a "clean" aircraft with no missiles on board.
Maximum G's - 2.5! Maneuverability was not its strong point.
Range - Here's where it shines. Around 1,600 miles. More than twice that of any other Soviet interceptor. Endurance was around 3 hours.
In many ways this was a typical early 1960s interceptor, just super-sized. High wing loading, poor visibility, missile-only armament, maneuverability sacrificed for speed or in this case range.
The initial cadre was selected from MiG-17 and MiG-19 pilots. They reportedly had a difficult time transitioning to such a large aircraft. Especially since the trainer version wasn't developed until later.
Front cockpit. Looks very similar to a TU-22 bomber. Note the control yoke - unusual for an interceptor.
One advantage of a big airframe is that it has room for a big radar. The TU-128 carried the RP-5M Smerch radar operated by the back-seater. Detection range was around 30 miles and it could lock on somewhere around 25 miles. Not bad for its day.
Rear cockpit. Radar display looks to be at the bottom of the instrument panel.
As long as we're building a big airplane we might as well give it a big honkin' bomber-killing missile and they did, the R-4. In NATO we called this the AA-5 "Ash".
This was a seriously big missile, 17 feet long with a 4 foot wingspan and weighing in at over 1000 pounds! Only the TU-128 ever carried this missile, probably because it was the only plane that could lug it into the air.
4 R-4 missiles loaded. Note the characteristic Tupolev landing gear fairings behind the wing.
In typical Soviet fashion the R-4 came in both a semi-active radar and a heat-seeking version. The TU-128 would have carried two of each. Standard doctrine was to ripple off one heat-seeker and one radar missile at the target.
The radar guided version had a range of 15 miles and the IR version could only make 9 miles, probably as far out as it could get a lock-on.
If my sources are correct, this was a slow missile, only about mach 1.6. It had a massive 118 pound warhead (shudder). A near miss by one of these would still probably do the trick. Contrast that with an AA-8 "dogfight" missile and its tiny 6 pound warhead.
The Smersh radar/R-4 combination had good "look up" capability against targets flying higher than the TU-128. This makes sense when you consider the time period it was designed.
Capability against low flying targets was essentially nil. Even the improved TU-128M/R-4M of the early 1970s couldn't engage a target flying below 1,500 feet. Note that when you see a Soviet designation with "M" after it that means "Improved".
Trainer version. The instructor sat in the extra cockpit in the nose. They called these "Pelicans" for obvious reasons.
They kept these in service until 1990 although they started phasing them out in the 1980s in favor of SU-27 (Eeek!) and MiG-31 (Yikes!) interceptors. Most accounts have them all being chopped up in the 1990s, but one source claims that a few are still flying - towing gunnery targets.
So could one of these shoot down a B-52? Maybe, if he got lucky. I wouldn't want to test it, but I think the Tupolev would have been at a great disadvantage, especially towards the end of its service life.
The bomber's ECM suite would initially be able to jam or spoof the Smersh radar. With "deception jamming" we could make it display a bunch of false targets or make it look like we were somewhere other than where we were. They'd know we were in the neighborhood but they'd have a tough time pinpointing us.
Russian radars, while not sophisticated, were quite powerful however. If managed to get close enough his radar could probably "burn through" our jamming. If he could get a lock on, even a near miss with one of those massive R-4 missiles would be game over. 118 pounds of explody isn't going to leave much.
That assumes the bomber presented a cooperative target, however. A good SAC crew wasn't going to sit there and get shot. If the engagement took place at high altitude, I think the B-52 would have easily out turned this thing. He actually couldn't pull any more G's than the bomber. That huge B-52 wing would let you make a pretty impressive turn at 40,000 feet.
Down low he'd have never found us and even if he did, his missiles wouldn't work that low. He had no guns, and in 1990 we still did. If he tried to close in for a ramming attack (and he probably would) he'd have had to come into our gun range to do it.
PVO pilot dwarfed by his TU-128.
The most likely scenario is we would have detected him long before he detected us. This would have forced us to drop down to low level much earlier than we wanted to and waste precious fuel. So just his mere presence would have made things more difficult for us. That's reason enough for the Soviets to have kept these in service.
Obligatory youtube video. You can see a dual missile shot around the 55 second mark:
I actually rather like this aircraft. It's got those sleek, early 1960s lines. It's certainly unique and one has to admire the audacity it took to actually build something like this. It's a great example of an aircraft designed to fill a specific niche, which it did quite well.
If I ever get to Russia I'm going to find this museum.