A coffee-table book about (mostly) Cold War aircraft designs, by American Tony Butler and Lithuanian Yefim Gordon. The title is something of a misnomer, since just about everything in the XSSR was “secret”. Even though this book was published after glasnost, many of the illustrations are “artist conceptions” and photographs of models. Some of the implications are a little sad; the various design bureaus would produce innovative and potentially spectacular designs; then “the authorities” would insist on changing everything back to familiar concepts. I expect a book about the politics of Soviet aircraft design would be fascinating but such a thing probably can’t be written.


By and large “the authorities” seemed to react to Western aircraft designs and insist that the Soviets produce something better – even if the Western design was a dead end. For example, in the early 1950s the US briefly flirted with a VTOL aircraft, the Convair XFV and the Lockheed XFY. The intent was to have a “convoy escort” aircraft that could take off and land from a small space on a merchant vessel or escort ship – something similar to the catapulted Hurricanes that combated the “Condor menace” during WWII. Neither project was terribly successful; landing backwards was interesting for the pilot, a turboprop aircraft couldn’t match the performance of contemporary jets, and the West ended up with sufficient aircraft carrier, air defense missile, and long-range aircraft resources to counter any potential Soviet air attacks on convoys between the US and the UK. The Soviets, however, took the idea and ran with it, ending up with the Sukhoi Shkval, which had twin jets instead of a turboprop and got around the rearward vision problem by having the pilot’s seat swivel 180°. Except, of course, the Soviets wouldn’t have had any convoys to escort.


OTOH, the Soviets put a lot of effort into more conventional STOL aircraft, with dozens of designs (there was even a STOL version of the MiG-25 – the drawback being that by the time all the additional ducts, intakes and nozzles were inserted the aircraft couldn’t carry enough fuel to actually go anywhere). The STOL design the Soviets finally settled on was the Yak-38 – which, again apparently due to the conservatism of “the authorities”, looks remarkably like a Harrier.


The MiG-25, of course, created its own legend in the West; when I was growing up the conventional wisdom was that the aircraft was intended to counter the B-70 and that the US had “tricked” the XSSR into building a useless aircraft by abandoning the supersonic bomber. As it happens, the MiG-25 was far from useless, although it may not have been capable of intercepting a B-70. Although the engines were capable of propelling MiG-25 to Mach 3, at speeds above Mach 2.83 the aircraft became uncontrollable due to aileron inversion. The XB-70 exceeded Mach 3 in test flights. I note that the Wikipedia article on the MiG-25 claims that the top speed is limited by engine damage, not by aileron inversion as claimed by Butler and Gordon. The original intent of the MiG-25 program included both interceptor and reconnaissance versions; the recon version turned up fairly often in the various Arab-Israeli wars; if you can scrape up $20800 there’s a Russian tourist company who will give you a ride in one.


Interesting enough for this sort of work. What’s missing is any sort of air combat evaluation of any of the aircraft; many of these have appeared in Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Syrian against F-4s, F-14s, F-15s, F16s, and miscellaneous other Western aircraft. ( )

Text was very dry, besides the cover there is zero artwork unlike the publishers previous WWII German Secret Aircraft books. Most of the photos are of the models built, some interesting photographs. Ok but not great. ( )