![]() The first Navy-oriented Soviet VTOL jet was inferior to the Harrier in nearly every respect, aside from the relative leap in technology compared to what was available beforehand in either nation. Had it not been for the Yak-141, this claim would've been nothing more than huffing some "copium." The truth was that the Yak-38 was not a great military jet by most measures. A technological demonstrator that showed the Soviets could indeed match the capabilities of the British Harrier and its American counterparts. Yakovlev often stated their Yak-38 VTOL jet was a transitional aircraft. But to tell the story of the Yak-141, you need to know the tale of its far less impressive predecessor. If nothing else, that's a signifier of how special the Yak-141 was in the late '80s and early '90s. That's in American money, mind you, not red roubles. If anything, Lockheed Martin wanted a cup of coffee with Yakovlev's engineers and possibly a few hundred million in cash subsidies. ![]() That was until a Soviet pilot defected to Japan and exposed it as nothing more than a big, bloated point-and-shoot interceptor that couldn't dogfight.īut this wasn't the case with the Yak-141. Air Force, who feared the thing could potentially tussle with the still-in-development F-15. Most famously, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 once scared the daylights out of the U.S. ![]() Historically, the United States and the Pentagon really don't like spooky surprises in terms of military technology from nations adversarial to themselves. ![]() At a time when the Joint Strike Fighter was just a glimmer in the eye of some NATO generals and Lockheed executives, it was the Soviets who set the trend for all future military VTOLs. Though it's hard to say anything nice about the Russian Air Force in 2023, the Yakovlev Yak-141 showed the best and brightest of Eastern Bloc aviation tech 35 years before all of the current unpleasantness began. ![]()
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