MiG-31BM/Κ Interceptor/Attack aircraft: News

F-14 with aim54 was a danger for tupolevs. But with the iranian revolution they probably had access to both.

That is Yankee bullshit... when the Iranian revolution happened the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and was there till 1988 or so, and during their time in Afghanistan one of the factions they were fighting was Iranian based.

There was no friendship at all between Iran and the Soviet Union and there is no way in hell the Iranians would hand over the technology for their primary fighter aircraft that was going to protect their airspace for the next 50 years... also bearing in mind that the Iranians also spent quite a bit of time in the 1980s fighting Iraq who was being supplied by the Soviets as well.

The idea that the Soviets were handed F-14 technology by Iran is just more American bullshit propaganda... Soviets are too dumb to make a good interceptor on their own so they must have copied ours.

Except the Zaslon radar is a PESA and an entire generation ahead of the set used in the F-14... not only that... the engines in the F-14A were terrible and the Phoenix missiles were the early model SARH models too.

The F-14 didn't really start getting cool till the F-14D model with engines in dry thrust more powerful than the previous engines in full AB, and upgraded longer ranged ARH missiles too.

US navy was quick to replace it with f-18.

Too quick... the F-14 had better range and speed and while it wasn't so easy to operate and maintain... Iran managed it... and the new Super Hornets are not cheap anyway... but certainly cheap compared with the F-35s.

As their fighters get more stealthy they get more expensive and less capable.

All the advanced shit they put in the F-18 they could have easily fitted into the F-14D with more fuel and all round better performance... and what they put in the F-35... well how about don't even bother till that shit actually works.

I remember reading somewhere the shah of Iran asked for a fight between f-14 and f-15 in front of him to decide which one they will buy and the f-14 won it easily.

The Shah had money and power... the British Challenger tank was basically funded by Iran as their new tank... but the British kept the design and technology and produced it in tiny numbers instead.

Mig-25 had the older missiles that lack the range of aim54.

The F-14 had to protect the ship it operated from... the MiG-25 would be based away from the targets it was defending, and the base it operated from would also be well defended too... the MiG-25 would need a much longer takeoff run, but probably had similar intercept performance to the F-14 because the MiG-25 is all fuel so it would fly at full speed most of the way, and at full acceleration and top speed the flight range of both aircraft is probably similar except the F-14 would be doing Mach 2.2 and not its top speed which it could not maintain without damage... the top speed of the MiG-25 is mach 2.83 and it would probably fly to its target at mach 2.6 to prevent heat damage.  The R-40TDs are actually excellent IR guided missiles ideal for killing SR-71s in head on shots, while the SARH R-40Ds they stopped using a while back.

The R-40TDs are still used on MiG-31s.

A mig-31 with r-33S or r-37 would destroy f-14 easily IMO. However the potential to upgrade the f-14 was huge but never done.

Would have to agree, but would say the F-14 was sabotaged... when the US was in Afghanistan the F-18s didn't have the endurance to get there with any payload and do anything so they used their F-14s and that included LANTIRN pods that they upgraded to connect to forces on the ground so a commander of a unit gets the IR and digital TV view the F-14 can see of the battlefield in real time and the commander can mark targets on the feed he gets from the F-14 to mark targets or friendlies... which would be like having direct drone support but a drone with a 20mm gatling and much heavier payload potential.

The F-18 and F-35 could probably do the same with their existing hardware and software, but they didn't have the range to operate in the Afghan theatre to use it...

The F-14 is plan B... plan A was the F-111 which was supposed to be a carrier based fighter bomber interceptor... but it was too heavy.

The F-14A uses the same engines and radar and the Phoenix AAM is based on the Falcon AAM this aircraft had... which later was developed into the F-111 for land based use only.

The radar of the F-14 had a much narrower field of view compared to the one of the MiG-31 (Zaslon). Same for the active radar of the AIM-54. A sharp turn and the missile lost track of the target.

The volume of airspace the Zaslon could cover was enormous... the MiG-25 predates the F-14 by some time... the MiG-31 is a better match in terms of timescale.[/quote]
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GarryB wrote:
Except the Zaslon radar is a PESA and an entire generation ahead of the set used in the F-14... not only that... the engines in the F-14A were terrible and the Phoenix missiles were the early model SARH models too.
The F-14 didn't really start getting cool till the F-14D model with engines in dry thrust more powerful than the previous engines in full AB, and upgraded longer ranged ARH missiles too.

You have missed the most juicy part of the story.
AWG-9 was a mechanically steered radar, and guiding 6 missiles in SARH mode was made by switching the frequency in intervals for all the missiles, one by one.
The effect you will hardly find in supa doopa materials was that the cone of engagement was limited by the steering of the antenna, and even more interesting, that the missiles were left alone for about 2s each.
I must not tell you what a 2s without correction means while engaging a Mach2.5+ maneuvering target the later Soviet missiles were.
Reading about how superb it was, and "the best radar until APG-77 emerged" is laughable. Zaslon would eat it alive with all the parameters, but surely it was a decade younger.

I remember at the time much was made about the different distances and speeds of the targets engaged in a famous test launching all six missiles at one time.... what they didn't mention is that while the targets were certainly at different distances and horizontal angles the vertical height difference between all six targets was less than 500m because of limits if scanning rates.

More importantly the Phoenix was not cleared to hit targets flying at 26km altitude like the Kh-22M, let alone the 40km altitude of the Kh-32 that replaced it.

It was not a terrible system... it was a better interceptor than the US air force ever had, but the midlife upgrade D model is where it reached being decent... new engines and new missiles improved performance and made it a very capable aircraft even if it would still struggle with its primary target of Tu-22M3s and their missiles.

GarryB wrote:I remember at the time much was made about the different distances and speeds of the targets engaged in a famous test launching all six missiles at one time.... what they didn't mention is that while the targets were certainly at different distances and horizontal angles the vertical height difference between all six targets was less than 500m because of limits if scanning rates.
More importantly the Phoenix was not cleared to hit targets flying at 26km altitude like the Kh-22M, let alone the 40km altitude of the Kh-32 that replaced it.
It was not a terrible system... it was a better interceptor than the US air force ever had, but the midlife upgrade D model is where it reached being decent... new engines and new missiles improved performance and made it a very capable aircraft even if it would still struggle with its primary target of Tu-22M3s and their missiles.

Oh, the opposite.
It was a very decent system when created in the 60s/70s.
If we consider the threat it was designed to deal with, that is P-15/21/22/5/35. Relatively high flight profile, slow and big missiles.
I suppose it could work against KS-10 as well.
It would work against more modern P-120 in some spectrum either, although not optimized against low flying targets, and I would expect the very same issues the Sapphire-25 station faced a decade earlier.
But the 70s when it was fielded, was an era of P-500 and KSR-5 that tripled the speed of KSR-10, and Ch-22, that fourfold it, and brought the altitude of the cruise state up to 30+ km... A wolfpack strategy elements appeared in the homing systems, and the carriers were getting to be harder to detect, leaving less time to counter the threat.
The Wunderwaffe label was created just for show.

It is a bit like the current Top Gun movie... soiling the name of the F-14 in a vain attempt to seem relevant by pretending it could take on four Su-57s and win...

Flying at low altitude through a convenient river valley... there was no reason for the Russian planes to follow him through there they could simply have flown above at a safe altitude and fired missiles down at him without having to manouver very much at all.

Probably not.

The altitude limitation for the average MIG-31 was about 20km, but the current models have upgrades and improvements to allow them to operate at 3,500km per hour instead of 3,000km per hour so I would think they might reach an extra kilometre or two, but likely not 5km higher.

Not sure why it would need to of course because its missiles can reach much higher and much faster targets...

The Orcs have the old model BUKs... SA-11... these missiles were never intended for near mach 3 targets operating at 20km altitude and I think they would struggle against such targets.

But think about HATOs position if they were in Russias place at the moment... the Russians replaced their SA-11 BUKs with SA-17 BUKs 30 odd years ago, and are now using Vikings with rather better performance all round and still able to use optical guidance.

Thread continued: https://www.russiadefence.net/t8857-mig-31bm-interceptor-attack-aircraft-news-2