[Note: For previous posts in this series, click here: 1 2]

Getting Down to Business: The Aircraft Collection

The Museum’s outdoor aircraft collection is divided into eight different sections. One of these is devoted to helicopters. Of the remaining seven, two consist of groups devoted to “Military-Transport Aircraft” and “Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War.” The rest are arranged in accordance with the experimental design bureaus (опытнyе конструкторскyе бюро, opytnye konstruktorskye burio, or OKBs) from which the planes originated.

As you enter the main gate to the outdoor collection, the first group of aircraft that you encounter (on your right) are those representing the Tupolev OKB.

Aircraft of the Tupolev OKB:

The Soviet Union’s premier airplane designer during the 1920s and 1930s, Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev was responsible for many of the USSR’s earliest aviation successes. In addition to constructing the country’s first all-metal combat airplane (ANT-3), Tupolev lead the design and construction of such milestone aircraft as the ANT-20 “Maxim Gorky” and ANT-25 (the first airplane to make a trans-Polar crossing).

Arrested at the very height of his success in October 1937, Tupolev continued to design airplanes for the Soviet state while working as a virtual slave laborer in a “special design bureau” run by the NKVD (later, the KGB). Freed in 1941 following the German invasion, Tupolev subsequently played an instrumental role in the development of post-War Soviet military and civilian jet aircraft.

Two airplanes highlight the VVS Museum’s Tupolev OKB collection.

The first is a Tu-4 a Soviet copy of the American B-29 Superfortress. The Tu-4 was reverse-engineered on the basis of three B-29s forced down over the Soviet Far East in the summer and fall of 1944 following bombing runs over Japan. The plane’s inaugural flight took place on 3 July 1947. The existence of the Soviet Tu-4 gave American leaders pause at the outset of the Cold War as they recognized that among the world’s then-existing airplanes, only the B-29/Tu-4 was capable of delivering an atomic bomb. In reality, the Soviet version was considerably inferior to the American original. The Tu-4’s range was so limited that any effort to bomb the continental USA would have necessitated a one-way mission on the part of the plane’s crew. Even then, success was far from certain.¹

A second noteworthy plane is the Tu-16. The Tupolev OKB’s first jet bomber, the Tu-16 debuted on 27 April 1952. The aircraft entered serial production in December of that same year. By the time that production ended in 1963, 1,509 had been built. The Tu-16 proved to be a highly adaptable aircraft. During the four decades that followed its maiden flight, nearly fifty different modifications were made to the airplane. The most significant of these was the transformation of the military bomber into the USSR’s first jet passenger airplane, the Tu-104.

The majority of the aircraft in the VVS Museum’s outdoor collection are parked within and around a large rectangular walkway (or, “quad”) one “short” side of which runs more or less parallel with the row of planes from the Tupolev OKB. As you turn away from the Tupolev planes and look down the “long” path, you see a large group of aircraft situated in an “L” pattern along the “lower right-hand” corner of the central “quad.” These are Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War.

Airplanes of the Great Patriotic War:

Nazi Germany’s surprise launch of “Operation Barbarossa” on 22 June 1941 was marked by the near-complete destruction of the Soviet Air Force. In the first two weeks of combat alone, the USSR lost well-over 4,000 aircraft (as opposed to only 150 losses suffered by the Luftwaffe). The ability of the VVS to weather the storm of the initial German offensive, regroup, rebuild, and ultimately help repel the invading Nazi forces stands as the brightest chapter in the history of Russian aviation.

Not surprisingly, the Museum possesses a wide array of combat aircraft from the Great Patriotic War. Among these is one of the first fighter planes to emerge from the Mikoyan-Gurevich OKB, the MiG-3. Small, nimble, and fast, the airplane represented a major step forward in Soviet aviation design when it was unveiled in the spring of 1940. During early high-altitude test flights the “I-200” (as it was then officially known) was reported to have reached a top speed of 404 mph (651 km/hour) making it, according to Soviet officials, “the fastest fighter plane in existence.” However, in actual combat conditions at lower altitudes the MiG-3 did not match the performance of Germany’s frontline fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-109. Still, the airplane was one of the few bright spots for the VVS in the opening months of the war. 3,500 MiG-3s left Soviet factories before production was halted (in order to increase the output of other aircraft) in November 1941.

The Petliakov Pe-2 is one of the standouts in the Museum’s collection of World War II-era bomber aircraft. First tested in May 1939, the Pe-2 was the quintessential example of the Soviet emphasis on “frontal” bombing operations in the years immediately preceding WWII. The plane was designed to provide close air support and attack capabilities in conjunction with ground offensives. During the War, the Pe-2 served as the mainstay bomber of the VVS (just over 11,400 were produced). Modified versions of the plane played a role in aerial operations from the outbreak of hostilities in June 1941 until the fall of Berlin in May 1945.

The contributions of the Lend-Lease Program to the Soviet effort in the Great Patriotic War are implicitly acknowledged through the presence of several American aircraft in the Monino collection. Chief among these are a P-39 Airacobra and P-40 Warhawk. Considered obsolescent by the Allied Air Forces at the outbreak of World War II, these planes nevertheless provided valuable service on the Eastern Front flying ground attack and air interdiction missions. (Interestingly, three of the USSR’s top four aces recorded the majority of their kills while aboard P-39s.) The Museum also has a Lisunov Li-2. A license-built version of America’s justly famous Douglas C-47 (DC-3), the Li-2 comprised the bulk of Soviet air transport capacity during (and well after) the War.

In Part Four of this series, we’ll take a look at a huge helicopter, a super fast passenger jet, and airplanes from the Sukhoi OKB…

[ For the next installment in this series of posts, click here: 4]

1. For more on the Tu-4 see, Dictatorship of the Air, pp. 276-278. [↩]