Thunda,I was just responding to your "fastest climbing aircraft ever built." statement 
...to me,MiG25 is the ultimate hot rod \m/...mach 2.7...and there is a myth that in Iraq MiG25 was clocked at mach 3.2...true or not,I don't know.
And it takes you closest to space than any other plane...
Cheers 
Holds time to climb 98,400ft from brakes off in 4mins 3.86secs, and also holds the unbroken max alt for an air breather at 118,900ft.
At the time, in the 40s-50s exceeding 50,000ft was considered space travel because there is no difference for a biological organism in terms of effect. In the 60s however space flight was officially classed at 100,000ft and so pilots who exceeded this altitude in an aircraft zoom climb (first possible in the F-104 with a rocket booster), actually received their "astronauts wings" as a formal certification. I think today it's something like 120km.
It's pretty unlikely an airbreather craft is ever going to break the Foxbat's altitude record. The Flanker kills its time to climb but only to combat heights like 35,000ft.
The Streak Eagle broke some of the Foxbat's earlier records, it was setting them from 1965 when the FX requirement was laid out.
It was an Egyptian MiG-25RB flown by a Russian pilot doing a recon near Jordan in 1973. It was picked up by Israeli GCI who directed an F4 intercept, but the story goes it simply accelerated out of range which was quite a feat considering the Phantom held the level speed record just before the Blackbird-Foxbat competition and nobody really expected Foxbats in service to do these kind of speeds, a Phantom couldn't. In fact most jets advertising 2+ Mach top speeds can barely manage 1.6 Mach in service. Well the GCI ground stations clocked this one doing 3.2 Mach racing back to Egypt, that part is documented and Defence Secretary Robert Seamans confirmed it the same year when he declared to media the Foxbat to be easily the best interceptor in the world.
But this was also involved with the cost of air superiority development at this point. The Eagle was given ridiculous, unattainable engineering requirements on the basis of the belief the Foxbat had achieved Phantom and Blackbird performance in one airframe you can mass produce by the hundreds. In 1973 talk of alien technology in the hands of the Russians went around the Oval Office, no lie. It was an insanely paranoid time that hadn't managed to get very far from the Cuban Missile Crisis politically.
So the way it worked out was the Eagle, Tomcat and other air superiority projects threatened to bankrupt the US keeping up with the Russians. Well as it turned out the Foxbat was a very limited aircraft type, it could perform surprisingly well, as shown in Iraq it will dogfight like a Phantom (nothing like an Eagle or modern composites fighter though), and it will either climb like a rocket or accelerate like a missile, but its engine life is so low the entire Ukrainian based PVO force literally had to be retrained to fly them in the 80s update, because they couldn't replace engines used up in training. And they used very old school tech, the Smerch is a valve/vacuum set, the R-40 missiles are over-engineered, the ergonomics are very basic, etc.
So the Foxbat is something which can only just barely manage to survive its own performance capabilities once or twice in use. Flight operation procedures demand that speed does not exceed 2.5 Mach except without special permission and in practise the maximum normal speed of the Foxbat is 2.35 Mach but it can do that with a full external warload. No other jet fighter in the world can break 1.8 Mach with a war load except early versions of the Eagle, the F-15A was fitted with a engine management override as a cheat to exceed 1.78 Mach (normal flight speed restriction) and reach speeds of up to around 2.5 Mach (the design requirement), but not unlike the Foxbat the engines have to be fully torn down and rebuilt upon landing (in the Foxbat if overspeeding occurs which is common, they have to be scrapped).
The Foxbat wasn't really designed for straight line speed however, it was altitude reach and time to climb although one way to reach extreme altitudes is with extreme speed capabilities, that's the idea behind things like the Blackbird and Foxbat. With two missiles a MiG-25P can attain 79,000ft in level flight for two minutes and fire the R-40 to a reach of 88,500ft. Doesn't quite deal with Blackbirds but handles the U2 and Valkyrie just fine and pretty much single handed ended the prospect of those two aircraft entering Russian airspace (the SA-2 helped but human hands in visual range is better for the tech of the day).
Foxbat was in fact built to counter the A-11 (the original version of the SR-71 that was used by the CIA before being released to the USAF/NASA, add radar-absorb paint and change some equipment for A-12, add Pheonix missile system for YF-12A, the SR-71 was originally meant to have a bomber capability). So in a sense the Foxbat failed in its design requirements as an interceptor but it was a great success in tactical recon, they can roam about the battlefield with virtual impunity. Foxbat interceptor development therefore continued for its original design requirement (M and MP versions which became the Foxhound), whilst the series was produced in mostly recon types and given a modest update mostly inspired by security breach of Belyenko's defection and the need to improve engine life in interceptor versions for training purposes. Export Foxbat-E usually didn't get the updated radar though and had to make do with the old valve/vacuum Smerch. They had ECM update which helped (flares/chaff).
Iraq used their few Foxbats really well. On at least two occasions a pair of Foxbat interceptors went streaking through the midst of F-15 and F-14 escorts to buzz and fire missiles at US attack aircraft. The Foxbat which famously shot down a Hornet also buzzed an A-7 and fired a missile at an A-6 which were all being heavily escorted, then simply accelerated away. Another fired three missiles at two EF-111A Ravens which were under heavy Eagle top cover and chased them off station, then avoided interception easily and returned safely to base while one of the Strike Eagles in that package was lost to a SAM due to the absence of the Ravens. Later in the war Foxbats escaping to Iran were being interdicted by sweeps of Eagles, two fired missiles unsuccessfully at one flight of Eagles and then out-accelerated both them, four sparrows and two sidewinders fired back. The Eagles called for another flight to head them off, four more were simply outrun and two managed to intercept but four sparrows fired at them were simply outrun before the MiGs again disappeared.
This balances the one-sided reporting of shows like "dogfights" for the Foxbats used in that conflict to show actually quite an effective aircraft. It couldn't sustain quite as much as a Phantom in a really hard turn but otherwise flew just like one and was really, really fast at all heights with tremendous acceleration and climb.
Author
Topic: mig 21 opponent (Read 19664 times)
