Webster

The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --American Statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852)


Saturday, June 28, 2014

Restored MIG-3 flies again *revised*

I had some photo issues...I hope I fixed them.   Sorry Murphy...

One of the sites I have bookmarked is "EnglishRussia"  It is a website that has stuff that you can see in Russia.  It is interesting to see equipment that I have only seen in "Friend or Foe" cards actually see them in color.  I am a staunch American but I would like to travel to Russia and I would like to go to St Petersburg check out all the museums and stuff where Peter the Great hung out.and go to Volgograd(Stalingrad) and check out all the historical stuff. One thing I can say about the Russians, they take their history seriously.
    I ran across this while I was catching up on my blogging and other peoples postings and saw this and really liked it.  Perhaps Murphy would roll with an "Old Mig" instead of a O2-birddog..

  Here is some more stuff on the Mig's:

   
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3 (Russian: Микоян и Гуревич МиГ-3) was a Soviet fighter aircraft used during World War II. It was a development of the MiG-1 by the OKO (opytno-konstruktorskij otdel — Experimental Design Department) of Zavod (Factory) No. 1 to remedy problems that had been found during the MiG-1's development and operations. It replaced the MiG-1 on the production line at Factory No. 1 on 20 December 1940 and was built in large numbers during 1941 before Factory No. 1 was converted to build the Ilyushin Il-2.
On 22 June 1941 at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, some 981 were in service with the VVS, the PVO and Naval Aviation. The MiG-3 was difficult to fly in peacetime and much more so in combat. It had been designed for high-altitude combat but combat over the Eastern Front was generally at lower altitudes where it was inferior to the German Messerschmitt Bf 109 as well as most modern Soviet fighters. It was also pressed into service as a fighter-bomber during the autumn of 1941 but it was equally unsuited for this. Over time the survivors were concentrated in the PVO, where its disadvantages mattered less, the last being withdrawn from service before the end of the war.


Soviet KV-1 Tank just pulled from a river in Russia.
Another one...In a Finnish Museum.

      This article is from them including the pictures and "English is a second language" sentence structure.  I am not criticizing, just an observation.

     Remember how we showed you a WW2 tank that they pulled out of the river? Yes, that was their fifty-fifth operation of pulling large WW2 machinery from the bottom of Russian rivers and lakes. However this is something different – this time another group of enthusiasts have pulled a real WW2 plane out of the lake and fully repaired it so that the plane that you can see in the air in the picture above is a real WW2 plane they recovered.
The group of people went to the no man’s land in distant parts of Russia and pulled the old war plane from the bottom of a lake which didn’t belong to anybody, then restored it investing some of their resources, and ultimately got a free plane!
See how those Red star wings looked when they were freshly recovered from the lake mud. I find it interesting how they pull them out –  they put car tires on the wings and around the body of the plane, then inflate them so that the plane rises up from the bottom. See it here:



This particular plane was found in the Murmansk region, the northern part of which is close to Finland and Norway. Here are those inner car tires on the wings.

As soon as they raised the plane they use pressurized water to remove the lake mud from the body.

They say that the plane starts rusting as soon as it gets into the open air.


So they rush loading it into the truck.

The truck takes the plane to the train station where it is loaded onto the train car and destined to travel a few thousand kilometers to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. There, in a special factory, the plane is going to be restored and turned into a flight legal machine.

Here, it’s being restored.

And rebuilt. It might take a few months to finish this job!



Everything looks like new! There is a shot of the same cockpit when it was fresh out of the water, you can compare to its new look now.


Finally, putting wings back on the plane.

And getting the plane out to the street for the first time.

After everything is checked and painted plane is ready for its first flight. First time since it was shot down tens of years ago, back in WW2.


Here we go! By the way this is a MiG plane.




9 comments:

  1. Sounds fantastic, but the pics aren't loading for some reason.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey Murphy,

      I hope i fixed it. I had to do a manual save on each photograph then import them to the website.

      Delete
    2. It works great now. Wonderful pics, and yes, I could certainly find a hangar for that Mig or one like it at my airport.

      Delete
  2. It's working now. Why does a Russian tank have a swastika on it? German capture?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yep. The Germans captured a bunch of them early on when the Russians were retreating, and towards the end, the Russians captured a ton of German machinery and pressed it into service when it was them of the advance.

      Delete
  3. Interesting that he test flew it with the canopy open...Prepped for a quick exit just in case? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Robert,

    The Finnish captured it during the Winter War" when the Soviets under Stalin first tried to seize parts of Finland and rapidly realized that the Soviet Army was not combat ready because of the purges Stalin inflicted on the Officer Corp. They came back and finally forced the Finns to capitulate by sheer manpower. The poor performance of the Red Army helped solidify the idea of invading Russia to Hitler.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow Sexy! Looking nice - the Mig-3 looks a lot like a Tomahawk - before it got the big engine-scoop and with a longer nose...They shared airspace together... http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/romanenko/p-40/

    ReplyDelete
  6. Just how far back could they squeeze that cockpit? Actually, the design appears to borrow heavily from racing planes of the 30s. Most other fighter designs seemed to move their cockpits forward by the war years.

    ReplyDelete

I had to change the comment format on this blog due to spammers, I will open it back up again in a bit.