Soviet X-Planes

by Bill Gunston, Yefim Gordon

Release Date: January, 2001

Edition: Hardcover

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Unique yet dissappointing untold history of Red Aviation

On the plus side, this is almost as comprehensive a book as you can find that goes between the cracks of Soviet aviation development, turning up all sorts of interesting machines. Unfortunately, this is also as comprehensive a book as you can find given that cold war security strictures have made it hard to get the crucial bits of information. We should be happy that we can even get such information about airplanes like the Sukhoi supersonic bomber obviously patterned on the American B-70, or the family of airplanes which bore and then descended from the MiG-21 (including one using a rectangular chin inlet and canards making it a dead-ringer for the Eurofighter Typhoon, but preceding that plane by about 25 years). Though the book offers much information that you would not have seen found, the gaps are conspicuous. The book is not without avoidable flaws notwithstanding the unavailability of information: the structure is all wrong, giving each plane its own little section and going by alphabet, rather than crafting all the information into a single historical narrative that could have offered clues into the missing history. (There are two reasons I can think of to explain why there are no pictures of a promising prototype in flight, or why the prototype itself can't be found: either the first flight went off badly, or the plane was never built at all.) By describing each plane as if in a vacuum, the author cuts away, most of its story. Military hardware historians know that the story of one warplane frequently includes the story of another - the B-70 including the story of the B-52 and the U-2; the F-111 interdependent with the F-14; The F-86 and the MiG-17 - so it makes no sense to devote single sections to one airplane or a family of planes. Also, the author gives no dimension to the Soviet acquisitions process that determined which planes would get huge production contracts and which would remain just one-shot test-beds. (The Soviet experimented with the tailless delta design in their Tu-144 airliner, even going to the point of modifying a MiG-21 with a tailless delta as a flying subscale analog, but never went that much farther - why not?) And none of the narrative describes what it was like to fly these beasts. Still in all, a book of some great and overlooked history and some great pictures to go with them.

Soviet X-planes by Yefim Gordon and Bill Sweetman

I found the book an extremely interesting study of Soviet experimental aircraft and prototypes. Though dozens of Soviet aircraft types were built, a policy of secrecy surrounded all new aircraft types. It is not a book with very much text but more of a collection of photographs from Soviet archives. Many of these were shown for the first time and the earliest machines go back to the early 1930's. Among the interesting types featured are "Mother Ships", the "Caspian Sea Monster" and high Altitude aircraft. It also reveals a lot of information on the extent to which Nazi technology was tranferred to the Soviet Union contributing to make that country a leader in aerospce. I found "X-Planes " a very interesting book and have no regret buying it, though more books on this subject have followed since it came out.