Mig-31 zaslon
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| MIG-31 ZASLON By A.I. Fedotchenko The late sixties: The Cuban missile crisis is already history, however, the Vietnam war keeps raging on - a major war characterised by the wide use of aviation. The memories are still fresh of downing the American U-2 Blackbird reconnaissance plane travelling at Mach 3 over the Urals mountains - the heartland of Russia. The Soviet Union had to find an adequate answer to the threat posed by the US and NATO and, first of all, cover its northern border from air attacks including cruise missile strikes. The situation caused the development of a most efficient interceptor. The thousand-odd kilometre border could not be effectively defended by the then air defences and MiG-21 fighters. A new interceptor had to have long legs to push the intercept range off as far as possible. It also had to develop maximal airspeed and be able to win in aerial combat both against single and multiple 'bandits'. Even this brief outline of the situation in the second half of the sixties indicates the Soviet Union had to design a radically new interceptor aircraft. Such an aircraft was designed and fielded in 1981 with the Aviation of the Air Defence Forces. The development of the S-155M interceptor aircraft was assigned to the Mikoyan Aircraft Design Bureau, while the Tikhomirov Instrument-making Research Institute (then known as Radio Industry Design Bureau) was tasked with designing its guided weaponry. In 1968, the programme was given green light by the resolution of the Council of Ministers and Communist Party's Central Committee of 24 May, 1968 (?397-152). While Mikoyan had built the MiG-25 with its performances closely matching those of the prospect interceptor, the Tikhomirov NIIP had no such an edge. And the task was formidable -the NIIP had to develop its first long-range radar capable of detecting enemy aircraft against the ground with the targets flying on the head-on or pursuit courses. None of the then radars was that capable. To cap it all, the radar had to be able to track the targets acquired (i.e. to update their coordinates and position regularly) within the maximal wide coverage area. The NIIP christened the weapons control suite as Zaslon - Russian for the 'barrier', 'obstacle' - the barrier at the Russian border. Nearly all technological solutions were innovations. For the very first time, there was the high-repetition pulse radiation (so-called quasi-continuous radiation) employed, as was digital signal processing, integral computer. For the first time, the navigator was provided with both detection indicator and tactical situation display. For the first time, the discrete target illumination and missile semiactive guidance through the use of discrete signals were developed as was the multiple target tracking and engagement capability. For the first time: well, one could carry on and on with it but let us dwell on the most important things. The Zaslon radar pioneered the phased array. To date, there have been no interceptor across the globe that could boast a phased array. Almost all combat capability of the new interceptor emerged due to the phased array radar (PAR). The radars of the time operated a mechanical drive to scan the aerospace. When the antenna's ray hit a target, the drive would begin tracking the target, while the pilot would be completely unable to keep abreast of the situation and see any other targets. The track-while-scan technique is only a partial solution to the problem, since it can provide neither wide coverage areas, nor high precision of the target coordinates. The emergence of the PAR solves the problem radically. Reorienting the ray in any direction within the cone of 120њ - 140њ takes the radar mere 0.001 sec. The peak of the whole MiG-31/Zaslon FCS programme was the flight test of 15 February, 1978. On that day, the MiG-31 took off to detect, lock on and track 10 targets simultaneously. The targets travelled towards the interceptor in two groups at both higher and lower altitudes than that of the MiG-31. The targets were detected and locked on at a range of 140-180 km. Tracking was stable. The experiment was crucial for the interceptor's designers. It became obvious that their work had come to the fruition. Even though nearly two years of further tests loomed ahead, they were sure they would succeed. The second landmark experiment was the interceptor's simultaneous destruction of four led targets. As a result, the following MiG-31 characteristics were confirmed: - programmed aerospace coverage; detection, lock-on and simultaneous tracking of up to 10 targets within the 50-2,800 m altitude brackets in both good and adverse weather conditions with the enemy electronic countermeasures (ECM) (scan area of -/+ 60deg-70 deg; - detection range for the SR-71 and F-16-like targets against the ground makes up 200 km and 120 km respectively; - 4-target simultaneous engagement with guided missiles in parallel with calculation of launch parameters; - control of the interceptor while cueing it in on the targets, discrete target illumination; - cannon fire; - passive infrared (IR) target search capability; - semiautonomous operations of 2-4 MiG-31 teams - a 4-aircraft team could swap data on the 800-km frontage at a distance of up to 2,000 km from the ground command post; - cueing MiG-23s, MiG-25s, MiG-29s and Su-27s in on targets. Twenty years later. July 1998. Four Su-30s and two MiG-31s took off the Savasleika AFB (Nizhny Novgorod region) to be joined later by an A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft and two Il-78 tanker planes. The formation passed along the following route: Savasleika - Astrakhan - Moscow region - Novaya Zemlya archipelago - Savasleika. The crews were not ferrying their aircraft back and forth, rather, they maintained communications among themselves and with the A-50 airborne command post, as well as accomplished a variety of missions en route. They would assume various group formations - a MiG-31 would lead the Su-30 strike aircraft and enable them attack ground targets, then the Sukhois would protect the MiG-31s from surface-to-air missiles to enable the interceptors to stalk a faraway aerial target and shoot it out of the sky. The MiG-31 Zaslon is still in the inventory and "can destroy the aggressor's strategic bombers even over the North Pole before they approach close enough to fire their air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM)," says Chief of Russian Air Force's Main Staff V. Sinitsyn. For all of us, designers of the MiG-31 Zaslon interceptor, the song rings true: "There's only 'MiG' between the past and the future:". It is people who create everything in this world. What great designer teams and beautiful personalities used to develop the MiG-31 Zaslon interceptor! Even most prominent of them are too numerous to be mentioned here. However, the three men whose incredible efforts resulted in the Zaslon should be named - they are Boris Iosifovich Sapsovich, developer of the phased array radar design and technology; Victor Konstantinovich Grishin who created the MiG-31's general configuration - excellent manager and experimentator; Yevgeny Yakovlevich Savitsky, chairman of the State Flight Testing Commission. |
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