I distintly recall buying a Mig-29 board clock in the early 1990ies on a street corner …
I still have it - just turned towards the wall, as I learned the luminescence is somewhat radioactive
(just to be clear - I am aware that this clock might never have been inside a Mig-29 … and rather was an overproduction of Plojot Plant Nr 122. in 1988 or so)
case in point: if your country colapses, you lose your army job and can get pennies to the dollar for selling “whatever”, then a lot of russians will be selling “whatever”.
lot of the stuff also works on commercial (eastern block) trucks … or might be “made to fit”
We can learn something by interviewing actual Russians, though. Even if it is paranoia, many people believe this stuff. So I was told that the claim of 200k cameras in Moscow is seriously out of date, and that there are over 400k surveillance cameras in the Metro system alone. Every bus has 5 cameras, 3 on the inside and 2 on the outside. These are constantly streaming over the Internet and monitored, not by tired secret policemen, but by Chinese face-recognition software.
It’s probably radium-based, which means alpha particles, which means that even the glass face is completely adequate shielding. Just don’t eat or inhale the paint, and you’ll be fine.
Because it’s an unobtainable goal, as Russia will never agree to it, nor for that matter would any other country or government that has not been occupied and/or unconditionally surrendered.
Former intelligence operator nitpick coming: the Su-24 isn’t a fighter. It’s a bomber. Some variants can carry air to air weapons but is very unsuited for such a role. The USSR’s most common fighters are the MiG-29 and Su-27, which are a match for most Western fighters prior to the F-22 and F-35.
The age of a plane is not necessarily a sign it sucks; aircraft can be updated a lot. The USA still operates some really, really old airplanes like the B-29 and F-15. The likelihood Russia has carefully maintained them, though, seems… low.
You must be thinking of the B-52. While there are a couple of flying B-29s, they’re only for show. The B-52 is still in active use, though, and ~70 years old.
I graduated from USAF pilot training 41 years ago (ouch!) in 1982.
Somebody in my class got a B-52 assignment. Whose father and grandfather had flown them by then. By now my classmate is old enough (barely) to have grandkids of his own in USAF pilot training. So it’s possible someone is flying B-52s whose great, great grandfather flew them.
My classmate was probably the limit case as his granddad was one of the original B-52 test pilots when the USAF was first accepting the type in 1952-55. And granddad was a Colonel back then. So one of the very first of the B-52 pilots ever. I lost touch with that classmate shortly after we all dispersed to our assignments, so I have no idea if his kid or grandkid even exist, much less that they fly/flew BUFFs. But it’s possible.
The only previous reference to the B-52 age was that pilots were flying aircraft older than they were.
Theseus B-52; what besides the airframe is old? Engines even if not upgraded would have worn out, defensive weapons are no longer machine guns, electronics have vastly improved, etc.
I’m hoping some of them will hit 100 years. But they’ll be beaten by the DC-3, which was designed in the early 1930’s, and there are still close to 200 of them in active service. One reason they have such long-lasting airframes is because they were overbuilt to account for manufacturing sloppiness by hastily-trained workers, and also because they weren’t pressurized. Pressurization cycles kill fuselage.
But I’ll bet there are still DC-3’s flying when the last B-52 is retired.
Wikipedia says there are still some flying in transport roles in various militaries, but I couldn’t find a list of them.
The DC-3 has had some pretty good mods available over the years that keep it fresh, such as a turboprop conversion instead of those R-1830 radials. Maybe the militaries still using them are using converted models.
