It is even more fun to head over there and get a tour through the graveyard. Actual pilots of some of those birds give the tours and they know many of these planes very well.
On a tangent, how much do you notice the political tensions in your everyday life? I read some accounts by people from Odessa who said they didn't bother much and saw as their first priority that nobody died no matter on what side. Are you still far enough away from the Crimea to ignore everything if you chose to do so?
Also I'm wondering if people will give you strange looks exporting a 4-engine military aircraft out of Ukraine these days. That'd certainly be fun to try.
We're almost bordering Crimea, but Crimea is an autonomy, so what happens there is more or less confined. You can ignore politics here if you choose to do so, but unfortunately you can't ignore economic repercussions of it. Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income).
As for tensions, our city is pretty much evenly split up pro-russian/anti-russian. Majority of people I know is anti-russian, but this is probably demographics bias, because older people (who lived half of their life in USSR) are mostly pro-russian. But you won't see many fights here over this. In everyday life when someone mentions they are from one camp and someone from another, we usually just laugh it off and change theme. Some extremists do escalate the conflict, but they're not good people anyway, no matter what side they're taking.
I've witnessed one episode recently when playing at trivia competition with my team. It's split up to pro-russian/anti-russian, just like our city, but we just joke casually about each other and that's it. One of the pro-russian members is a world-class athlete. She took part in world championship on behalf of Ukraine and came to this trivia competition in national athletics team's suit. One of the anti-russian people from other team was shouting to her that she does not deserve to wear this suit, because she's pro-russian and hence anti-ukrainian. But that's just nonsense, because she earned the right to wear this suit more than anyone else in that room. Fortunately, this was one of just few exceptions. So what you read about people in Odessa is true for people in Nikolayev - majority here value respect for each other more than political beliefs.
"... Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income)."
Evgenuiz;
Are you, or have you news, if bitcoin, or other e-currency, is being used, becoming popular as an alternative to your
"...you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card", etc?
I was hoping you'd ask! It was luck. I had noticed signs of a civilian airport in the background of one of the pictures. When I looked at Nikolayev on Google Maps (I was wondering how close to Crimea these ports mentioned in the eBay auction are) I noticed the airport and zoomed in.
"The airplane is not ready to fly. It is necessary to make a technical service and prolongation of the data limit."
Guessing something got lost in translation. In any case. as aircraft maintenance isn't my area, any idea how viable/costly it is to get airworthy? Could you even get spare parts anymore?
Spare parts are probably attainable (there's a reason retired aircraft are mothballed rather than scrapped), and the major companies that the built the engines, etc, are still around.
Out of 500 or built ~60 are still in service. Getting parts as a civilian operator might be touchy though. It's probably being sold more as a museum piece.
In terms of doing a restoration Russian stuff is usually pretty viable since mechnically they're fairly straightfoward and rugged, and not much in the way of computers or microelectronics of any kind. Even with all that said, it would probably be a $10M+ (quite possibly +++) to get it airworthy again, and even if you did it would be very expensive. Fuel burn on those things is about 2000 gph, and Jet-A is currently ~$6/gal, so you're looking at $12k/hr just in fuel expenses. Maintenance will probably at least double that hourly figure.
I volunteered for an Air Force museum and even non-operational/replica parts were expensive and hard to find for aircraft. I would imagine getting this certified/flyable would cost nearly as much as the purchase price when the dust settles.
Not really. It would NEVER be certified for US commercial operations as the US FAA does not have a reciprocal airworthyness agreement with the Soviets[1]. FAA certification - required for commercial use (but not experimental, which is how old warbirds are generally operated these days) would take years and probably $100M+, fi the FAA would ever even consider it.
[1] Ironically, we DO have such an agreement with Poland, so in some cases (but not the TU-95), aircraft built in Poland have a path towards approval for US ops that those built elsewhere in the USSR wouldn't have.
Oh sorry - it was the bit about non-operational/replica parts that caught my eye. I agree that even the best laser sintering is probably way below the mechanical tolerances required for aeronautics applications, but it seems like it would be a great way to build models and do things like engine cutaways etc.
Ekhm, let me correct that slip: " in Poland [...] elsewhere in the USSR". Poland was fortunately never part of the USSR and hopefully never becomes even in USSR 2.0
Used to. There used to be slaves, but it does not mean that it's acceptable to enslave people now. While slavery and saying "the Ukraine" is not the same, the latter shows the clear lack of geopolitical knowledge.
I understand the point, and I think it is good to correct people when they refer to Ukraine incorrectly.
However, comparing a (typically accidental) prepended word to slavery makes me recoil from your argument. I think it is similar to "Reductio ad Hitlerum"[1]. People who refer to the current country as "The Ukraine" are incorrect, but saying that they are implicitly supporting the history of that name is overreaching.
I don't think most westerners even associate anything particularly problematic with a prepended "the". It's used in "the Netherlands" for similar historical reasons; like the Ukraine, the Netherlands was a descriptive term for a certain region before it was a sovereign state (the Ukraine meaning the borderlands, and the Netherlands meaning the low countries). Whether it's retained or not when the region became a sovereign state seems more or less arbitrary.
there is a reason why US and the others were rushing for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons 20 years ago :) See Lord of War too.
Interesting how recent developments continue to show the difference between how countries are treated when they have nuclear weapons vs. when they don't have, like North Korea vs. Iraq. Looking at Ukraine i wonder what Iran think :)
To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade. Seoul being with range of massive amounts of North Korean artillery is one. The concern of both China and South Korea about the potential for floods of refugees is another.
> To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade.
Many reasons why Iraq was considered more important to invaded, and all of those reasons are "barrels of oil", as elucidated in 2003 by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "Look, the primarily [sic] difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil." [1]
I don't think you're reading Wolfowitz's quote properly. He's saying that the U.S. has leverage over North Korea because their economy is in such a poor state, leverage it didn't have over Iraq because of their oil reserves.
If you're claiming the U.S. would be likely to invade North Korea if they had significant oil reserves, that's wrong. As Wolfowitz says in the context around your quote:
The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy.
...
In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.
Hard to draw from this that the "only" reason invading Iraq was more important was oil. The lack of economic leverage made a military option relatively more practical, as did the military and social situation of Iraq vis a vis its neighbors.
The most important thing is that China supports NK for ideological reasons. Sure, China would prefer a communist regime that isn't quite as well suited to parody, but it'll take whatever communist regime it gets for propaganda and ideological reasons.
But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)
Did people raid the Poltava Museum of Long-Range Aviation? According to wikipedia it has the only Tu-95 in Ukraine (as well as a Tu-160, in case you want a supersonic strategic bomber)
a good rule of thumb for warbirds is that however much it costs you to buy it is about how much it will cost you per year afterwards to keep it flying.
That is a fine piece of hardware. what would restoration cost? How do you even restore it ? spare parts, technicians on the Tu-95MS are probably not in ample supply.
One main issue with owning aircraft like this is not the cost to get it ready to fly from its current state but maintaining it to fly. In the air-force you normally have large mechanic teams that are dedicated to the aircraft. As soon as it lands its taken to the hanger and the teams get to work on it. These are not your normal cessnas where you land, tie down, then come back a week later and throw gas in and go. As soon as these planes land, there is stuff that is broken or needs fixed/tuned each time. You will end up employing an entire team to keep this air worthy. This is the same issue you find with older migs for sale and why they are so cheap.
I would imagine that as far as expertise goes, a seasoned mechanic in that field could work nearly as well with this aircraft as any other, much the same way our own expertise in computer hardware might translate across varying brands and models, gotchas and idiosyncrasies aside.
when Tu-95 were flying out on patrol in Atlantic, the US underwater listening stations (for submarines) installed on the Greenland-Iceland-Norway line were registering the planes too.
> The prop tips are well into the supersonic range.
I've yet to come across any firm proof that the Bear has supersonic tip speeds, even the wiki article says "according to one media source".
Now obviously with any prop aircraft you can generate a scenario where the tips go supersonic, but I feel "The prop tips are well into the supersonic range" is a disingenuous statement. I do agree with you in general principle though - tips can, and do, go supersonic.
Some back-of-the-napkin calculations for the Bear, using the figures given by the media source on wikipedia:
5.7m prop diameter 750rpm at cruise
Circumference = pi*diameter = 18m 750rpm = 12.5 rotations a second
Giving a tip speed of 220m/s, so contrary to the media source the blades are not supersonic by themselves.
You could, of course, engineer a scenario where the combination of the airflow through the prop + the prop tip speed > mach. But you can do that with a Boeing Stearman too, you just avoid it by design due to the increase in drag, and not to mention the stress placed on prop blade that is subsonic at the root, transonic in the middle, and supersonic at the tip.
I've seen people give the noise created by the Bear as evidence of supersonic blades, but I'd put that down to interactions between the contra-rotating props, a bit like blade slap on a helo.
Modern jets aren't prop-driven Soviet strategic bombers. They are typically built for comfortable, cost-effective, long-term operation, not to be a credible threat to deter (or carry out) a life-or-death war with an economically far more advanced adversary.
454 hours of flight time seems low for a military plane built in the 80's. That is not very many flights from the Soviet Union to off the U.S. coastline.
Many Soviet vehicles and aircraft weren't of great build quality so they tended to have training vehicles that would be used by many crews until they fell apart, and vehicles reserved for combat.
This aircraft was built in '87, by which time the Soviet economy was in serious trouble and training was at reduced levels. The Bear always projected a scarier image than was reality.
> there is a TU variant with swept wings, var geometry, and jet engines that replaced this plane that most Russian republics use
"Most Russian republics"? So, more than half of the 1?
And "Tu" is just an abbreviation for Tupolev, its not a particular plane of which there are variants. Saying a "TU variant" is like saying a Boeing variant.
And there are two different Tupolev strategic bombers that meet that general description (the Tu-22 and Tu-160), neither of which is a variant of the Bear.
Looks like it has a few siblings, so what you're getting is not as exclusive as you might think...
That explains the pictures on the eBay auction appearing to be from different fuselages - they actually are (the two rightmost ones on Google Maps).
EDIT: Hmmm, maybe not. Perhaps it's the same plane in different locations, I can't be sure.