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Aviation History
1977
1977 - 3811.PDF
1810 G| FLIGHT Internationa/, 17 December 1977 BACKFIRE the bogey it IN A WAR of threats, capabilities and intentions, the effec tiveness of a weapon system can be judged by the extent of the countermeasures which it forces the op position to take. By this yardstick the multi-role weapons platform developed by Alexei Tupolev's design bureau must be judged one of the Soviet industry's more success ful products, irrespective of its technical standard or its capability. Backfire is regarded as a prime threat in the Nato central region, over much of the world's oceans, and still, to some extent, in the continental United States. Accurate assessment of the threat posed by Backfire has been made a little more difficult by a primary misconcep tion on the part of the US Air Force. In mid-1969, to the immense surprise of most observers, a large swing-wing aircraft was reported to be starting flight trials. The USAF automatically assumed that any large swing-wing aircraft must be a strategic bomber first and foremost, designed around the same sort of requirements that the USAF was considering for its Advanced Manned Strategic Aircraft (Amsa). Not surprisingly, the existence of Backfire became a major reason for funding Amsa for production. Nine years after the North American B-70 Valkyrie was finally cancelled as a production programme, marking the start of the USAF's rethinking of the bomber, but only one year after Backfire was reported, Amsa became the fully funded Rockwell B-l. The performance of Backfire ceased to be a matter of academic debate and became a matter of politics when the Soviet Union told the USA that Backfire was not a strategic bomber, but a purely tactical system, and re fused to discuss the aircraft within Salt (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). The US team stoutly maintained the opposite, and was more than a little embarrassed when intrigued US engineers took their Hewlett-Packard calcu lators to the few available impressions of Backfire and came to the conclusion that the Russians were right. As one investigator put it: "We were told we were wrong, that it was none of our business and to get our noses out of it." Eventually, Backfire was removed from the Salt I ac cord, and it became possible to work out what the aero plane was really for without being branded as a Fifth Columnist or having the friendly local Ku Klux Klan set fire to your Pekingese. In fact the picture which emerges is probably more alarming: although Backfire was a medi ocre strategic bomber, it is good at some of its other roles. ^^^^^^^H WHB**'''" Mi ,<ms#0 i tfflMHHHH •P
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