Russia Bringing Back Blackjack

Russia Is Bringing Back Blackjack, the Last Soviet Bomber

The Cold War bomber is going back into production.

Wikipedia photo.
 
By Kyle Mizokami

The last bomber produced by the Soviet Union is going back into production, a quarter century after the last aircraft was built. The Tupolev Tu-160 bomber, known to NATO as the Blackjack, will return to serial production in 2021. The bomber will carry both conventional and nuclear long-range cruise missiles to strike distant targets.

Moscow made the Tu-160 strategic bomber in the 1970s as a response to the American B-1. The B-1 was the first bomber to incorporate variable geometry "swing wings" that could be swept backward for increased efficiency at supersonic speeds and swept forward for subsonic speeds. It was also the first stealthy bomber, the better to penetrate the Soviet Union's air defenses.

The Tu-160 attempted to copy both aspects, and as a result looks very similar to the B-1. The Blackjack's long, graceful lines and white livery earned it the nickname "White Swan" in Russian service. Although aircraft production ran from 1984 to 1992, only 36 aircraft were built. Nineteen bombers were inherited by Ukraine upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and of those, eight were sold back to Russia while the remaining eleven were scrapped.

Today the Russian Aerospace Forces maintain a fleet of 16 White Swans, which act in both the nuclear bomber role—where they are capable of striking targets in the United States with Kh-55 nuclear cruise missiles—and in the conventional cruise missile carrier role. The bombers took part in Russia's first air launched cruise missile strike against ISIS forces in Syria in 2015.

Although Russia has upgraded its existing Blackjacks with modern navigation equipment and new engines, there are just too few of them. So Russia plans to buy between 30 and 50 of the updated bombers, named Tu-160M2. The Tu-160M2 will act as a cruise missile carrier, much like the B-52 bomber, launching Kh-555 conventional cruise missiles with a range of 1,240 miles and the Kh-101 (conventional) and Kh-102 (nuclear) cruise missiles with a range of 3,400 miles.

One new feature will be the ability to drop precision-guided munitions (PGMs). The Tu-160 was built without the ability to use laser-guided bombs, and unlike America's B-1 and B-2 bombers, the Tu-160 was not modified in subsequent years to drop PGMs. Existing bombers can't drop laser or GLONASS (the Russian equivalent to GPS)-guided bombs on targets—only expensive, long-range cruise missiles. The Tu-160M2, however, will have this ability built-in. The first Tu-160M2 will fly in 2018, with serial production set to start in 2021.

All of this brings up an important question: Where is Russia's PAK-DA bomber? A full-sized mockup of the much-hyped stealth bomber was assembled last spring, but will probably not go into production until after the Tu-160M2 production line closes. Russia simply doesn't have the resources to fund two bomber programs at once. In the meantime however, the new White Swan should prove perfectly capable for years to come.

Source: Defence Blog