MiG-31BM/Κ Interceptor/Attack aircraft: News

Canards would not help, as the aircraft would simply be just too heavy... not just for takeoff, but also for landing.

Hole wrote:

Hole wrote:The timeframe remains the same for aircraft and ground based missile systems. The Woronesch radars will give them a few minutes warning time and the aircraft will already be in the air and pointing in the direction of the threat.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

Hole wrote:

And there's all that room near the back where they can place a booster rocket stage(s) to greatly increase the range.  Should go from a in theater intermediate range threat to a ALICBM. If the MiG-31K platform can handle the extra weight then they should really pursue this development eventually.

mnztr wrote:

magnumcromagnon wrote:

Hole wrote:

And there's all that room near the back where they can place a booster rocket stage(s) to greatly increase the range.  Should go from a in theater intermediate range threat to a ALICBM. If the MiG-31K platform can handle the extra weight then they should really pursue this development eventually.

Then it starts to turn into a strategic weapon and all the agreements come into play.

GarryB wrote:I rather suspect that the MiG-41 will be a different shape and design because the speed requirements are different, but I also think systems and components from the new aircraft could be fitted to the MiG-31 to keep it relevant and make it more potent, so radar and new weapons and new engine options could improve performance to the point where it could continue to be used in different capacities in different roles.

Air and Space wrote:

There’s a famous Russian saying: Something new is something old that everyone has forgotten. Consider the MiG-31 fighter, a seemingly obsolete 40-year-old warhorse that may be on the verge of a dangerous second act, or even a third.

The -31, whose forte back in the 1980s was chasing U.S. SR-71 spyplanes at enormous speed 12 miles above the Soviet Arctic, has officially been repurposed as a delivery vehicle for the Kinzhal (“dagger”), one of the family of hypersonic missiles Vladimir Putin is counting on to get Russia back into the global arms race.

But that’s the less intriguing job. What’s really roiled defense aviation geeks for the past two years is a photo, posted by unofficial snoops, of a MiG-31 carrying a mystery missile that looks even bigger than the Kinzhal. And the Kinzhal isn’t small: It weighs half a metric ton and can fly 1,200 miles.

Observers speculated that this newer, larger missile was meant to be shot upward at U.S. and allied low-Earth-orbit satellites. An April 2020 article by British scholar Bart Hendrickx posted in The Space Review flushes out this hypothesis following clues from Russian defense contracts and terse official statements. His conclusion: The MiG-31 is knee-deep in a secret Kremlin anti-satellite plan dubbed Burevestnik, the storm-riding bird memorialized in a 1901 epic poem by Maxim Gorky.

Why the MiG-31? To start with, it’s big. You might say huge. It took off for its first mission in 1981 weighing 42,000 kilos (92,400 pounds), one-and-a-half times the mass of the Sukhoi Su-27, its Soviet contemporary, and toting four R-33 missiles, which were just 10 kilos lighter than the Kinzhal. The -31 is also one of the fastest airplanes flying today. It cruises as fast as Mach 2.4 (1,840 miles per hour at sea level, or a little unde 1,600 miles per hour at altitude), and can rev above Mach 2.8 in hot pursuit. It ranged 1,250 kilometers (776 miles) even before mid-air refueling was added in the mid-1980s.

The MiG-31 flies at extreme altitude—66,000 feet—to minimize air resistance. Closer to the ground, it can still make Mach 1.2. Its R-33s can (in theory) hit targets 300 kilometers away. The blend of speed and lethal firepower earned the “Foxhound” respect from its NATO opponents back in the day. A squad of four -31s was enough to keep pests away from 900 kilometers of border.

Again, in theory. No one ever tested them.

The MiG-31’s cardinal flaw was lack of versatility. It deterred against airborne attack on the Soviet homeland, a far-fetched scenario even in the you-blink-first ’80s, and arguably kept the Blackbird scrupulously out of Soviet airspace. But with the advent of multi-purpose fighters, like the Su-27 and U.S. contemporaries F-14 and F-15, the MiG-31 was decisively mono-functional. “It’s more like a surface-to-air missile than a plane,” says Michael Kofman, director of the Russia Studies Program at Washington defense think-tank CNA.

Too big and clumsy for use in dogfights or localized post-cold war conflicts, the Foxhound languished while other Russian weapons systems switched to earning their keep through export. Four decades on, the MiG-31 has never fired a shot in anger—or earned the Kremlin a ruble from any foreign sale.

Present-day conflicts may be another story as “blinding” the enemy’s eyes in the sky becomes a critical factor in battlefield dominance. Shooting at satellites from fighter aircraft is not exactly a new idea either. The U.S. Air Force did it successfully at least once back in 1980s Star Wars days, clocking a dummy target with an ASM-135A missile launched by an F-15 (“The First Space Ace,” April/May 2018). The Soviets’ planned response involved mounting a modified MiG-31 with a 79M6 missile. It got through a few test flights before perestroika put all such efforts on a long pause. The Kinzhal, if Russian propaganda is to be believed, boasts a range of 1,200 miles, which just happens to be the maximum altitude of a low-Earth-orbit satellite. So it doesn’t stretch credibility (too much) to believe that the enormous Missile X at Zhukovskoe was a cousin of the Kinzhal modified for space attack.

If one is aiming for orbiting targets at that prodigious distance, starting with a mobile platform 66,000 feet up offers considerable advantages. You save boatloads of energy—and cost—launching from that altitude. No less important, the MiG-31 could shift satellite killing to a 24/7 regime, says Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Ground-based systems may have to wait for a day until the satellite passes within their range,” he explains. “Air launch gives you more flexibility.”

Many critical U.S.-NATO satellites circle beyond Kinzhal/Missile X’s reach in geostationary or medium-Earth orbits (where the GPS constellation is). But the low-Earth-orbit tier is also packed with assets that need closer proximity for higher-resolution images of a given tactical theater, Kofman says. Troops on the ground have come to rely on these connections, rather like the average citizen on their home internet. “We’re pretty dependent on space-based assets for precision-guided weapons, real-time target-tracking, a lot of the backbone of modern conflict,” he says.

Russia’s military needs to connect a lot of dots, and spend a lot of rubles, before the MiG-31 can realistically crack this backbone. But its ability to carry massive new weapons has at least earned the aging system one more reprieve. In 2015, Moscow’s defense ministry announced it would upgrade 130 aircraft to the latest -31BM modification by 2030. The monster roars on.