Chapter 33 Belenko Defects

A few minutes later, Andre, who had changed into a flight suit, got into his fighter plane No. 031.

Andrei's action last time was so shocking that under the propaganda of various Soviet media, Andrei has become a household hero. Naturally, heroes must be treated specially. Although Andrei went to the hospital to recuperate and was away for more than ten days, Andrei's fighter plane was still carefully maintained and kept full of fuel.

After leaving the hangar, taxiing onto the runway and turning on the afterburner, Andre felt the huge takeoff acceleration, took off from the runway and accelerated!

Belenko, did your fighter plane really crash? Or did you defect?

If Belenko had successfully defected, it would have posed a huge threat to the Soviet Union. The MiG-25 would have been dismantled in front of the West, all its secrets would have been leaked, and its deterrent effect would have been gone.

In particular, the crude radar composed of electron tubes made the West realize the backwardness of the Soviet Union in electronic technology, and they were even less afraid.

This kind of thing must never happen!

August 6, 1976 was a full month earlier than Belenko's defection in history. Moreover, Belenko was not fighting alone. The reason why he was able to make up his mind so quickly was because of Anne! Inspired by Anne, in order to make the Western world accept him, Belenko finally bravely decided to defect!

Yesterday, he quietly went to Vladivostok and told Anne that he would fly a MiG-25 plane to defect to the island country! At that time, Anne and Belenko kissed passionately for five minutes, which gave Belenko great encouragement. Anne would also return to East Germany at the same time and wait for the opportunity to go to the West with her father.

Moreover, Annie promised Belenko that she would tell the United States through special channels that Belenko would fly to the free world today! If the message was conveyed correctly, there would be two F-4 fighters waiting for Belenko over Hokkaido. As long as Belenko flew over the median line of the Sea of ​​Japan, the other side would fly up to escort and protect him!

Today, when he got into the cockpit, Belenko was excited. He had had enough of being here! In his previous unit, he was treated as a psychopath. Coming here, he saw the same situation. His wife and children had all run away. What was the point of staying here? Thinking of spending the rest of his life with Annie, Belenko was extremely excited. For a man, having a beautiful wife is also a pursuit in life.

After clamoring to have his engine replaced with the stock one, Belenko finally got the chance to take off without a wingman and fly alone to test the engine's performance.

The only pity is that since the takeoff was in the name of testing the engine performance, the ground crew did not add much fuel before takeoff, only six tons of fuel. Therefore, Belenko could not turn on the afterburner and reach Hokkaido at the fastest sprint speed, and could only be like this now.

During takeoff, the afterburner was turned on for one minute, then the radar was turned off, and the aircraft climbed to an altitude of 8,000 meters and entered the sea. Belenko then equipped the aircraft and dived downward until it was below 1,000 meters, then gradually leveled off and turned off all radios.

After adjusting the course, Belenko flew at an ultra-low altitude of 300 meters above the sea.

At this altitude, even if he discovered that his fighter plane had crashed, Sokolovka would definitely not be able to find him if he sent other fighter planes to search! Even on the sea surface, the complex echoes caused by the waves would cover his signal in these echoes! As for visual discovery, in the vast ocean, if he wanted to visually discover an ultra-low-altitude aircraft without radar indicating the approximate location of the target, if he was really discovered, Belenko could only sigh that his luck was really as bad as the Mariana Trench.

In later times, in order to promote the powerful radar of the MiG-25, there was a widely-circulated claim that the radar of the Tornado-A was equipped with an altitude lock device, and the radar could not be turned on unless it reached a certain altitude, in order to prevent radio radiation from harming ground personnel. There was also a claim that the rabbit was burned to death. In fact, these are all wrong.

The MiG-25 is equipped with an altitude lock device, but this is not to prevent radio radiation from harming people on the ground. It is because the processing system composed of the vacuum tube integration circuit of the Tornado-A is simply unable to effectively process the numerous signals of the ground radar echo. When turned on at a certain altitude, the radar processing system is quickly submerged in the ocean of data. The single-pulse radar cannot effectively filter out the ground echo, which is also an inherent problem of vacuum tube radar.

As the actual pilot of the MiG-25, Belenko certainly knew that the advantage of the MiG-25 was its high altitude, and his own search personnel could not effectively search for him! As long as he could survive half an hour, he could live the life he wanted!

Belenko didn't know that just five minutes after he finished the "crash" performance, a MiG-25PD took off from the base to search for him! And this plane was equipped with a Sapphire-25 pulse Doppler radar!

When Andrei took off, he had already drawn a line in his mind, from the sea area where Belenko "crashed" to the Yakumo-cho base in Futami-gun, Hokkaido, a straight line. If his guess was correct, Belenko must be on this route!

The plane was fully fueled before takeoff, so Andrei generously continued to use the afterburner and flew at a speed of Mach 2.6 all the way to the sky above the area where Belenko crashed. Then, he adjusted the course and turned on his Sapphire-25 radar.

At the front end of the nose, the antenna of the airborne radar, which is nearly one meter in diameter, deviates downward by 42 degrees due to the movement of the universal joint to perform a pitch scan. The radar, with a peak power of 600 kilowatts, continuously radiates radar waves downward, passes through the sea surface, and returns to the radar antenna. The processing system continuously eliminates sea surface clutter, and a rotating bright line appears on the cockpit screen.

Fifty seconds later, Andre found a faint echo on the screen, at a distance of one hundred and an altitude of three hundred!

Let's go down and have a look! Andre turned off the engine afterburner and pushed the joystick forward. The huge steel fighter plane dived down from the sky. The echo on the radar screen became clearer and clearer.

With a flick of the switch, Andre turned on the TP-26-SH1 forward-looking infrared search/tracking system. Now it was tail-chasing. This system could easily detect the tail flame of a fighter plane and provide more accurate positioning for himself!

During the dive, the speed continued to increase. Seeing that the speed on the Mach meter was almost reaching Mach 3, Andre's heart also flew down like a rocket.

The altitude dropped below 10,000 meters and the dense atmosphere appeared, and No. 032 began to slow down.