Fifth-generation fighters are not new now, the United States has F-22A, F-35A B C, Russia has Su-57, China has J-20, and FC-31, France and Germany are also jointly developing fifth-generation aircraft, even South Korea, India have put forward a plan, Britain is planning to cross the fifth-generation fighter, directly develop the sixth-generation fighter, it seems that the world's major military powers have begun to enter the era of fifth-generation aircraft. At this time, it seems that not many people remember that there was once a superpower that also wanted to catch the trend of fifth-generation aircraft, and also put it into action and achieved results, that is, the Soviet Union. Today, let's talk about the extremely heavy MiG MFI fighter in the Soviet Union back then.
In fact, the Soviet Union's pursuit of fifth-generation fighters is not later than that of the United States, they demonstrated the concept of three fifth-generation aircraft in the 70s, although their technical routes are different, but they are able to suppress the fourth-generation aircraft, these programs have I-90, SH-90, B-90 and other projects, respectively, representing a new generation of fighters, attack aircraft, bombers. And in the early 80s, the United States had begun its fifth-generation ATF program, that is, the advanced tactical fighter project, the product of which was the F-22A fighter, so the Soviet Union's fifth-generation aircraft development finally had a real opponent, so that it was convenient for the Soviet Union to constantly concretize its own program.
The Soviet Union's fifth-generation aircraft plan has two research and development directions, and the reference combat system is still the Soviet Union's famous front-line aviation + fighter aviation ideas, so the Soviet Union is still like the fourth-generation aircraft Su-27, MiG-29 collocation, envisioning a five-generation aircraft composed of twin-engine heavy multi-role fighter MFI and single-engine light tactical fighter LFI combination. Among them, the protagonist of the article, the Mikoyan Design Bureau, refers to its own MFI program as Product 5The 12 program, which put its own light fighter LFI program, called the product 412 plans. In this way, Mikoyan began to draw his blueprint for the fifth-generation aircraft.
The Soviet Union's thinking was quite advanced, and they hoped that some parts could be shared between the heavy fighter MFI and the light fighter LFI to achieve a modular design, which seemed absolutely a genius idea at the time. However, the huge R&D system of the Soviet Union, in the development of such products that require extremely high innovation ability and high-precision technology, encountered the problem of slow operation of the system and mechanism, so the Soviet Union gave up the bidding of several design bureaus, and in 1983, instead put forward the plan of having all the design bureaus jointly develop the fifth-generation fighter, which became a national effort to develop a model.
However, even if one model is selected to focus on tackling key problems, it is necessary to choose one of the models of each design bureau to continue the plan. As a result, in 1986, the Soviet Union's Sukhoi, MiG, Yakovlev and other well-known design bureaus submitted their fifth-generation fighter design plans to the Soviet Air Force, and the Soviet Air Force selected the aircraft that best suited its own technical and tactical requirements and campaign doctrine according to its own needs. Among them, Sukhoi's scheme was a forward-swept wing fighter, similar to the later Su-47 "Golden Eagle" fighter, and the Yakovlev Design Bureau submitted a proposal for a fighter with a lift-up layout with a fuselage similar to the F-22 fighter, which in general resembled today's Su-57 fighter with canard wings.
The MiG Design Bureau, for its part, submitted the MFI for 512 plans and 4 of the LFI12 plan, after the Soviet Air Force, The joint research and analysis of the Air Defense Force and other units believed that the plan of the MiG Design Bureau was well suited to the Soviet Union's needs for fifth-generation aircraft and conformed to the Soviet Union's military doctrine and campaign theory, so the Soviet Ministry of Defense selected the MiG Design Bureau as the lead research and development unit of the Soviet Union's fifth-generation fighter program, and Sukhoi's Su-47 program was used as an alternative to the MiG Design Bureau's program. The Soviet Union put all the bets on the MiG, and if the story continues like this, the skies of the USSR in the 21st century will be dominated by the MiGs.
After receiving the task of leading the research and development, the MiG was not as happy as we imagined. The Soviet system was different from that of the United States, and it seemed that whoever was chosen had more work pressure, and it was not a private enterprise anyway, and it would not be as happy as an aviation giant like Loma when it got an order, and it didn't have much money to make anyway. Therefore, the MiG did not start with a very rapid project, they carried out a lot of pre-research and development of fifth-generation aircraft technology, and came up with many new concepts. In the end, after a lot of wind tunnel testing and model testing, the MiG decided on several things: first, the aircraft should have canard wings, because this would maximize the lift of the aircraft;He also used a large delta wing to make the aircraft maneuverable;The use of engine belly adjustable air intake, which allows the aircraft to maintain good power performance under large overload maneuvers;Finally, the MiG also wanted the aircraft to be equipped with vector engines.
The most important thing is that the MiG wants its MFI fighter to be a fighter that can do radar, and they made a scaled model dedicated to wind tunnel testing to detect the radar reflection area of the fighter. Through the tests, the MiG design bureau constantly changed and optimized the aerodynamic layout of the aircraft, so that the aircraft has better stealth performance. Although it seems that the MiG's MFI fighter is not the design with obvious reflective surfaces in the West, the MiG did get the stealth result they wanted.
In 1987, the MiG began to submit the design of the aircraft to the USSR Ministry of Defense for review. The Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union was very satisfied with the interpretation of the MiG's design scheme, but due to the tight defense funds of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union abandoned the research and development plan of the LFI fighter and fully supported the MFI design scheme of the MiG, and changed the engineering code name of the MiG MFI fighter to "Product 1."42 ", MiG-1Thus began the development of the prototype of the 42.
MiG-1The 42 fighter is to have stealth capabilities and supersonic cruise capabilities, in the Soviet Union, this concept is called the "system shock machine" idea, that is, to give full play to the fighter's penetration ability, and then hit the air and ground targets encountered, and hit the enemy's important system nodes, which has high requirements for speed and stealth. So the MiG Design Bureau decided to have all the ** built into the magazine of this aircraft, and developed a huge ** belly magazine for him.
Still out of stealth considerations, MiG-1The 42 aircraft, like the American fifth-generation aircraft, began to choose the V-shaped vertical tail, which had a camber deflection angle of 15 °, and in the wind tunnel tests of the Soviet Union, at this angle, the MiG 142 has the best stealth ability. At the same time, the Soviet Union changed its rough workmanship and minimized the gaps in the aircraft, which could be a factor in increasing the radar reflection area (RCS). In the end, Soviet designers designed a diamond-shaped, but smoothly transitioning nose section for this aircraft, which looked flat, but not a typical diamond-shaped nose. Therefore, although the Soviet aircraft does not look as angular as the Western stealth aircraft, it does take a lot of measures, and the radar reflection area is not large, which is very characteristic of the Soviet Union.
MiG-1The 42 design scheme used the best avionics equipment that the Soviet Union could come up with at that time, such as the airborne phased array radar that the Soviet Union was still developing at that time, and the rear-view radar deployed in the rear of the fighter, so that the fighter had a 360° detection and search capability, and even guided air-to-air missiles to shoot over-the-shoulder and hit targets in the tail. In order to achieve this goal, the Soviet Union modified the AA-8 Aphid, R-73 and other famous combat air-to-air missiles to verify the backward design idea.
Although, we look at it in today's eyes, 1The 42 is not a fifth-generation aircraft in the purely American definition, but we must also admit that the MiG-1 uses a number of new technologies42, it can indeed surpass *** fighters in performance, and it is the level of a generation ahead. After all, he also has a killer feature: high-thrust engines. The USSR made 1The 42 has amazing maneuverability and supersonic performance, and the engine codenamed AL-41F was developed for it, and a large number of advanced technologies have been applied, such as FADEC full authority digital operation technology, etc., so that the aircraft engine has achieved a thrust ratio of 11 and a thrust of more than 17 tons.
MiG-1 of the yearThe Al-41F used in the 42 is not at all the same thing as the Al-41F1A used by the Su-57 today, the Al-41F was a completely new engine designed by the Rurika Design Bureau with a maximum thrust of 175 tons, and the military thrust is also more than 11 tons, which allows the MiG 142 achieved the ability to fly at supersonic speeds without afterburner. Today's Su-57 is equipped with the AL-41F1A engine, which is based on the AL-31F, with a thrust of only 145 tons, not a technical product at all.
In 1989, the Saturn-Rurica Design Bureau converted a Su-27UB fighter into an engine test aircraft, installing a huge Al-41F engine with a huge two-dimensional vector nozzle that appeared extremely incongruous, showing the MiG-142 huge dimensions and required power. This tail nozzle was called the LL-UV (PS) tail nozzle by the Soviet Union. This modified Su-27UB fighter has carried out several test flights, verifying the effectiveness of the vector tail jet, and in 1991, the AL-41F engine and its vector tail jet technology passed the national verification and was introduced into the MiG-1In the 42 fighter system, it has become its mandatory engine.
Also in 1989, the MiG Design Bureau completed the MiG-142 was designed with a full set of technologies, and the production of the first prototype began. If history had evolved like this, then the Soviet Air Force would have quickly received a mass-produced fifth-generation aircraft, the MiG-1The 42 will also become a fifth-generation aircraft on a par with the U.S. Air Force F-22A. However, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the story should have come to an abrupt end, but the stubborn MiG Design Bureau was unwilling to give up the high-tech crystallization of its own efforts, so it chose to self-fund the promotion of 142 projects. And in 1994, the construction of the first prototype was completed, and test flights were carried out in Zhukovsky, which became known as the MiG-144 prototypes.
But under the chaos and "shock" of the early years of Russian statehood, Zhukovsky's test flight center also fell into chaos, and after a full 1 year, the MiG-1The 44 aircraft began the high-speed taxiing test, after which the MiG invested its main energy in the Sukhoi heavy fighter because Russia did not buy the MiG fighter, which led to a lack of funds and fell into a standstill, during which there were many news that it was going to be integrated into Sukhoi, and the MiG was completely paralyzed.
It was not until 1998 that the MiG Design Bureau restarted the MiG-144 of the research and development work, moreover, is self-funded. In this way, the stubborn MiG in 2000 put the prototype of the MiG MFI fighter, the engineering code 1The heavy fifth-generation aircraft of the 44, put into its first flight, after that, the news of this fighter is difficult to see, its performance, as well as the results of test flights, including various data, are still a mystery to this day, and Russia also once showed 144 fighter prototypes, while people are curiously looking at this Cold War monster, the Su-57 fighter has already begun deliveries before the end of 2019, MiG-144 will never fly again.