Riding the Caspian Sea Monster. James May on how Ekranoplan works Was it a boat?
Was it a plane? A bit of both in fact. The Ekranoplan was one of the more obscure products of the fight for technological supremacy in the Cold War. Nigel Paterson, who joined Top Gear presenter James May for a test "flight", recounts its secret history. In September 1966 an American spy satellite flew over a Soviet naval base on the Caspian Sea and took a series of photographs. Their first guess was that this was a conventional aeroplane, possibly a seaplane, but one that was incomplete and much bigger than any aircraft the US had. But when the pictures were examined more closely, intelligence analysts calculated that, even if completed, it would actually fly really badly.
What they were looking at was, in fact, an Ekranoplan; a wing in ground effect or WIG craft designed to fly at very high speed a few metres over the top of the sea. The Soviet Superplane Program That Rattled Area 51. The surviving Lun ekranoplan was built as part of a closely guarded Soviet military program and is one of only two ever completed.
As big as it is, its design was preceded by an even larger plane called the KM. In the mid-1960s, when CIA analysts first saw satellite images of the KM, they knew only that something very large and very fast had appeared on the Caspian Sea. The bewildered analysts dubbed it the "Caspian Sea Monster. " According to a former CIA officer, the agency was so concerned about the discovery it developed an unmanned reconnaissance drone specifically for spying on the KM. The officer, Gene Poteat, and others claim that the government used the Nevada airbase popularly known as Area 51 to design surveillance technology, including the KM drone known as Aquiline.
The official name of the Soviet ship, intelligence officers later learned, was "prototype ship" (abbreviated "KM" from the transliterated Russian). What is an Ekranoplan? Igor113 - Экраноплан "Лунь" проект 903. Вот у меня и дошли руки до экраноплана.Я разобью рассказ о нем на 3 или 4 части: 1-экраноплан снаружи(1 или 2 части) 2-экраноплан изнутри, 3-док экраноплана.В 1987 г. на воду сошел "Лунь" первый корабль серии боевых ракетоносных экранопланов весом 400 т.
Главным конструктором был В.Кирилловых. Корабль был вооружен тремя парами крылатых ракет 3М80 или 80М "Москит" (НАТОвское обозначение SS-N-22 Sunburn). Второй "Лунь" тоже закладывался как ракетоносец, но начавшаяся конверсия внесла свои коррективы, и его планировали достроить как спасательный. ЛТХ: Модификация ЛуньРазмах крыла, м 44.00Длина, м 73.80Высота, м 19.20Площадь крыла,м2 550.00Масса, кг пустого самолета 243000 максимальная взлетная 380000Тип двигателя 8 ТРД НК-87Тяга, кгс 8 х 13000Максимальная скорость, км/ч 500Практическая дальность, км 2000Высота полета на экране, м 1-5Мореходность, баллов 5-6Экипаж, чел 10Вооружение: 6 ПУ ПКР ЗМ-80 Москит Под этим обтекателем находится морская РЛС.Вид изнутри будет в след. постах. С земли:-))