# Could a Tu-95 Bear bomber be landed on a Nimitz class carrier? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 20, 2015, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450 "2015-05-20T22:30:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![chacoguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/50afbb/32.png) [@chacoguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chacoguy)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2015, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450/41 "2015-05-23T03:55:26Z")
> [@coremelt](#): > > well the Tu-95 was the Soviet Unions primary intercontinental nuclear bomber. So presumably it has some pretty sophisticated encryption comms for communicating authorisation to enable the nuclear weapons on board. And hopefully the Soviet Union also had a permissive action link system to stop a rogue crew from dropping nuclear weapons without authorisation. The US would have been very keen to know the details of that. > > . [Not so much.](http://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-us-minuteman-si-1473483587) ---
**Author:** ![coremelt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4491bb/32.png) [@coremelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/coremelt)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2015, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450/42 "2015-05-23T05:20:21Z")
thats talking about the US permissive action links. As far as I know we don’t know what system that the Soviet Union / Russia uses and if they use no system at all that still would have been immensely valuable intelligence during the cold war. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2015, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450/43 "2015-05-23T12:06:35Z")
People keep referring to the Cold War in the past tense. IMO, that’s wrong. I think a lot of people have forgotten that we’re still in a cold-and-now-warming war with the Russians. TU-95s are still armed with nukes. As are a lot of SLBMs & ICBMs. And they’re aimed at the West, including the US. And on alert every day. And the gov’t of Russia is currently busy invading nearby semi-westernizing countries and daring us to do anything about it. And testing our air and cyber defenses every day. And probably our undersea defenses too, although that effort (on both sides) is pretty invisible. IMO we’re in about the same place tension-wise as we were in the late 1950s. Or perhaps the better parallel is the world’s relationship with the Nazis at the time of the annexation of the Sudetenland. It’s just that the US & EU media hasn’t woken up to that, preferring pix of ISIS beheadings. The key difference today is that Putin is much less of a \*status quo \*leader than Khrushchev was. This is more like the revanchist Andropov regime, but led by a fairly young and very vigorous leader, not a dying old man. Or, as I said, like the Nazis in the late 30s. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [May 23, 2015, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450/44 "2015-05-23T12:23:53Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Do you care if the crew and maybe a bunch of folks on the air craft carrier die? If not then you could probable steam the carrier into the wind, have the bomber crew fly at the lowest speed they could without stalling, then pull up above the carrier deck and stall the bomber. With a lot of luck and some really exceptional timing you might be able to have the thing crash on the deck, probably killing the crew and damaging the air craft carrier but have the bomber ‘land’ in a kind of sort of way (i.e. not fall off the deck into the ocean, and hopefully not blow up). A quick google search shows the landing speed of a TU-95 as 150 knots (~170 mph)…so, if the head wind is, say 50 mph, and the carrier is steaming at 40 knots, then the bomber pilot just has to skim along the water, pull up at the right moment to kill his air speed, stall and then drop to the deck, nose up and in full pucker mode! > > Simple really. 😛 Several people have mentioned the stall-'er-in method. I’ll use this post as an example. Not gonna work IMO. The pitch attitude required for low-speed stall is much higher than most folks expect, like 25 degrees. Which on an airplane that long, places the cockpit area about 65 feet in the air as the tail just skims the deck. If they do it perfectly the airplane then rotates downwards about the touchdown point on the tail. It hits hard enough to mostly shatter the structure, and start a very impressive fire as all the tanks rupture. Unless they’re also just about out of fuel. Over the years there have been several airliner accidents that amount to a very low-speed nose-high tail drag into the ground. The destruction is surprisingly comprehensive given the fairly low speeds involved. And it’s because of the large vertical component as the structure rapidly rotates downwards after first ground contact in the tail area. IMO the aircraft and black boxes of interest will be wrecked thoroughly enough that very little useful intel will come of it. And there will be zero survivors among the TU-95’s crew, rather negating their motivation to try the maneuver. As an aside, 40 knots for the carrier and 50 knots of wind are both pretty optimistic. 50 knot wind is both rare and very turbulent. Which makes doing the maneuver precisely enough implausible. As well, 50 knot wind doesn’t happen with smooth seas. Even if a Nimitz can make 40 knots on a calm day (color me skeptical but too lazy to check), it sure can’t do so into the teeth of the seas associated with 50 knot winds. YMMV. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/could-a-tu-95-bear-bomber-be-landed-on-a-nimitz-class-carrier/720450.md?page=2)