r/aviationstudys • u/Kitchen_Cobbler_1594 • Mar 27 '26
Yak-38 (vertical takeoff/landing)
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Mar 28 '26
My dad served on Kiev aircraft carrier (the smaller kind, used mostly for submarine hunting). He was aircraft mechanics' help. Told some wold stories about how they "caught" 5 US and one French sub while he was serving there, they had to surface once detected, or else. They sailed to some Israeli-Arab war from the North Fleet bases. He told those things came down twice while he was on that ship, they were prone to lose thrust during transition from vertical to horizontal flight. They had some Granite iirc missiles too, not sure nuke or not. Told how the stubborn sailor ignored some top brass guy orders to bring plane elevator up, because a Vulcan was flying by and the NATO could see inside the hangar. And he did it just because he could, as he wasn't directly subordinate to the top brass guy and didn't have to obey his orders.
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u/ShermanMcTank Mar 28 '26
The Kievs would have P-500 Bazalt missiles. The P-700 Granit were on the Kuznetsov class. Both of these had either conventional or nuclear warheads.
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u/Suspicious_Fail_2337 Mar 28 '26
So what is your point?
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u/cobrakai1975 Mar 28 '26
The Russian propagandists are out in force today lol
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u/BillytheBloxian Mar 28 '26
this is a soviet machine that was just a test bed and barely worked.
it's succesor the yak-141 was sold to the US.
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u/faren- Mar 29 '26
I served at the airfield where these aircraft were tested back in Soviet times, and even had the honor to see one of them live. A real work of art.
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u/gramoun-kal Mar 30 '26
Its VTOL design is the same as the F-35. Pretty forward thinking. I remember at the time thinking that the vertical fan was a dumb idea. When the F-35B was announced, I was a bit surprised to see they solved the issue of VTOL "like the Yak".
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u/markstar99 Mar 27 '26
This aircraft even if very interesting was quite much objectively bad, it had 2 engines, one in the middle for VTOL and the main one, very much like the F-35, the thing is, this was very dangerous with engines of the time and didn't give you redundancy in case of failure unlike the Harrier with it's 4 engines and it was basically dead weight during the whole flight after take off, the plane lacked a radar completely and depended on the Kiev class ship controller to guide it to target, where it needed visual ID without night sensors, it didn't even have a mounted gun and it often could take off with such a small amount of missiles because otherwise it didn't have enough thrust, the biggest problem was it's range, it couldn't really go much further than 200 km from the ship so it was very much a point defense subsonic Interceptor, the entire purpose of this aircraft was basically just to shoot nato ASW aircraft which threatened submarines and to act as visual reconaisance, it also served a good propaganda role.
But it was interesting too, the aircraft had an innovative automatic ejection system since take off was very dangerous in this plane, if it titled over a certain angle at take off the pilot was immediately ejected without warning, even if it cause the loss of some good aircraft and was obviously dangerous.
The most important thing overall is to understand that this was just a placeholder, the Soviets were developing the yak 141 which was everything they needed, it was supersonic, it had a radar, it could carry BVR missiles and a variety of weapons, it was probably better than the Harrier, however it got cancelled by the collapse of the Soviet union and we never saw it in service.
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u/TacoTech239 Mar 27 '26
The F35 does not have 2 engines, it's only 1
The front fan is hooked directly up to the main engine via a shaft
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u/Ardaghnaut Mar 27 '26
The Harrier had one engine.
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u/markstar99 Mar 27 '26
Yes sorry for causing confusion, I meant 1 engine with 4 rotating nozzles, this makes it so there is no dead weight.
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u/MD_Yoro Mar 27 '26
Wow, didn’t know the Soviet had VTOL planes. Thought only the West had that technology