Howdy All

Somebody approached me the other day {assuming I was the resident military 'expert' and erroneously assuming I would know the answer to his question } and asked me a question about Russian jet aircraft and what happened to those "specialty" and/or 'copycat' aircraft the Soviet Union produced back in the Cold War days.....

So, in an effort to answer his question properly, I turn to my bud's here at the 'Scale.....

Can any of our Soviet aircraft aficionado's out there tell me whatever happened to the likes of say, the aircraft copied after the Harrier...I think it may have been called the Yak something or other?
And, also, what became of the Mig 37 Ferret?

.....just curious. tia.

Tread.

Hi Tread,

Друг!

First, I am also not a VVS expert, but have a fair working knowledge of it from a past life...

...does he mean real Russian planes or the (pardon the pun) flights of fancy? The closest thing to a MiG-37 is the
Mikoyan Project 1.44/1.42:
--Wikipedia Mikoyan From Wikipedia

Also from that source is



The Harrierski is alive and well as the Yakovlev Yak-38 It morphed into the defunct supersonic
Yakovlev Yak-141 Freestyle

One of my favorite designs was a MiG-23 Flogger experiment, the MiG-23-01(23PD)'Faithless'. A beautiful design reminiscent of the Mirage F-1. It has been suggested that it became the basis for the Shenyang J-8 or Jian-8 Apollo or Handsome man; (NATO reporting name Finback).

As for Soviet copycatting, it did happen. Sometimes blatantly. However, to be fair, the Soviet and today's Russian aviation community is pretty impressive--hobbled by Communism then and lacking money now--impressive none the less. They did copy to greater and lesser degrees. I have an article from the early 90's that a defector told us that espionage netted them airframe design data from the F-16, F-18 and HiMAT, and stole an F-18 AGP-73 fire control radar (or components / data); this they estimate saved them 3-7 years and 100,000,000's Rubles of R&D for the MiG-29 / Su-27 series. Some of that, it is thought, has since been incorporated (funded by international sales) in the newer versions of these fighters: Su-30MKI vs F-16C and F/A-18E/F

MiG-37 does seem to be something that the boys (& gals) at Italeri came up with on their own. Russia closed their own "stelth" program before USA even started one.

Yak-38
http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_488.shtml

Andy

Well Gordon, as Fred has said the MIG 37 "FERRET" was not a real aircraft other than in the mind of a designer at Testor.

As for the "Harrier" copy I assume you refer to the YAK-38 "FORGER" which was deployed with the Soviet Fleet air arm. There were two others the YAK-36 "FREEHAND" and the YAK-41 "FREESTYLE" both of which were abandoned, before the production phase.

To be fair to the YAKOVLEV designers, I'm not sure that calling them "copies" is completely correct.

A little more info at http://www.vectorsite.net/avredvt.html