Pugachev's Cobra
A Sukhoi flying straight up and braking at near the speed of sound
“Upper Italy” has been working again. This time it had to do with a Russian air show called “MAKS,” or, to put that back into the Cyrillic alphabet, “MAKC”.
The event was a reminder of two things, both of some interest. The first is that the Russians still, to use a charming Italian figure of speech, “cannot organize a visit to a bordello.” Not to put too fine a point on it, the show was a mess. The other is that a Sukhoi-30 “Flanker” heavy fighter on a low-level pass sounds like the wrath of God on one of His really bad days.
These absurdly over-powered aircraft are of considerable interest to Western combat pilots because they can do something theirs cannot. They can fly straight up or, if the pilot knows what he is doing, simply stand still in the air, sitting on a tail of flame.
Because getting yourself into a straight up position in a fighter implies, as a by-product, using the entire belly of the plane as a sort of gigantic air brake, these craft can be clipping along at a high rate of speed and then suddenly come to a more than screeching halt and “hang” where they are in midair for a relatively long period of time.
The maneuver is know as “Pugachev’s Cobra,” after Viktor Pugachev, the famous Sukhoi test pilot who invented it.
There is an aerial combat situation where this might be a desirable way to handle your aircraft. Suppose you are dog-fighting and someone is on your tail, about to blow you out of the sky. Let us further suppose you are in a fighter that can suddenly reduce its forward airspeed from a zillion miles an hour to about zero, all the while shooting straight upwards like a rocket. If instead your plane is the one that is following and can’t do that – and no-one else’s can – then you are going to be forced to fly on, over-running your target, who is then going to drop back down and blast your ass to pieces.
American and European “top gun” types would be in deep shit if this mattered, but it doesn’t. The “Cobra” looks great at air shows, it is muscular and loud, it impresses the hell out of delegations from unsophisticated places like Venezuela and Malaysia, but that kind of dog-fighting ability hasn’t mattered since the Korean War – not incidentally the last time Russian-designed and American airframes actually went after each other in a big way.
In other words, the Russian military Establishment, far more than that of either Europe or the United States, is startlingly well-prepared to fight a 1950’s war if one happened along. Nowadays though, advanced fighters mostly throw missiles at one another from twenty miles away and, from that distance, Pugachev’s Cobra, wonderful as it is, does not present much of a combat risk. It might or might not be an effective way of eluding relatively stupid incoming fire, but it probably is not. Standing still is not a good way of avoiding anything fast and agile enough to follow you.
We bring this up because Russia’s loud and muscular President, Mr. Vladimir Putin – see what he looks like without a shirt (here) – has recently startled the West by resuming long-range patrols by nuclear-armed Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers for the first time since the end of the Cold War. There is a good Wikipedia article on the Tu-95 and recent Western contact with it (here). Following on the heels of the unilateral Russian decision to suspend the country’s participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe, or CFE, treaty (here), that appears to be a significant policy signal of some sort.
But if this sounds like the Cold War all over again, it is not. As the agency photograph of an RAF “Typhoon” escorting one of Putin’s aging turbo-prop “Bears” suggests – you can see that (here) – Russia’s armed forces are now horribly and totally over-matched by the West. It is worth remembering too that the rapidly growing Russian economy is now about to become the tenth largest in the world – and may soon equal, if things continue to go well, that of the State of Texas…
All of this means that Mr. Putin either is very badly advised or that he is not, in fact, rattling his sabers for Western benefit at all. The second is true. In the classic czarist fashion, he is playing to his domestic audience and, to a lesser extent, to possibly impressionable former satellite nations in the Baltic and, especially, in Central Asia. His bombers are meant to give precisely the same signal as his pecs in the rather odd portrait we linked to above. Putin’s term as Russia’s President is about to run out; he has though no intention whatever of retiring to some dacia to dribble away his “declining” years playing with grandchildren and drinking the horrible horse-radish vodka that the Russian language associates with the boozing habits of “old farts.”
But we said that the air show, MAKS, was a mess. It was, and it is interesting and possibly instructive to look at why. Though a very serious “Porta-potty” technology gap was in evidence – a French expositor, not very diplomatically, told a Moscow newspaper that when he used one he didn’t know “whether to urinate or to vomit” – the real problem was the eternal Russian one of colliding priorities. Many opening day delegations actually missed the inauguration ceremony because the astonishing multi-layered security intended to protect Putin (who was present) from his happy population created traffic jams that meant it took from four to as many as seven hours to actually reach the Zhukovsky Air Base where the event took place – a distance of about 25 miles from downtown Moscow.
As security collided with business, keeping the air show public away, so Mr. Putin’s evident desire to keep his nether parts firmly planted on the big chair collides with Russia’s desire to be taken seriously as a major world player.