Tupolev Tu-95

The Tu-95 grew out of a 1950 requirement issued to the Tupolev and Myasishchev bureaus: a bomber able to take off from Soviet airfields, reach the United States and return, with an unrefuelled range of 8,000 km and 11,000 kg of payload over the target. The Tu-4's piston engines had proved too weak and the AM-3 jets too thirsty, so Tupolev chose four turboprops. On 11 July 1951 Council of Ministers Decree No. 2396-1137 ordered OKB-156 to design and build aircraft 95 in two versions: the first with four 2TV-2F coupled units, due to fly in September 1952, and the second with four TV-12 engines, due in September 1953. Each 2TV-2F joined two TV-2 turboprops through a common gearbox driving two four-bladed contra-rotating propellers, with a nominal rating of about 8,900 kW per unit; the engine came from Nikolai Kuznetsov's OKB-276, with a team of former Junkers engineers, and was seen as a stopgap until the TV-12 matured. The Air Force commission approved the design in 1951, the wooden mock-up was built between August and November of that year and approved in December, and N. I. Bazenkov was put in charge of the programme, later becoming chief designer of the whole family.

Construction of the first prototype, the 95-1, began in October 1951 at Plant No. 156, alongside a second airframe for static tests. A Tu-4 converted into a flying testbed was used to develop first the 2TV-2F and then the TV-12. In autumn 1952 the aircraft was taken in sections to Zhukovsky, assembled there and handed over for factory tests on 20 September 1952. It made its first flight on 12 November 1952 with test pilot Alexey Perelet in command. On 17 April 1953, on the sixteenth flight, a failure of the pitch-control automatics on all four propellers made for a very difficult landing. On 11 May 1953, on the seventeenth flight, a broken gear in the reduction gearbox of the third power unit started a fire that could not be put out; five crew members bailed out on the commander's order, the burning engine tore away and the aircraft crashed north-east of Noginsk. Perelet, navigator S. S. Kirichenko, flight engineer A. F. Chernov and vibration technician A. M. Bolshakov were killed. The investigation found that the same fatigue failure had already occurred on the OKB-276 test stand and had been hushed up; even so, Tupolev defended Kuznetsov so as not to wreck the engine's development.

The second prototype, the 95-2, had its airframe completed in November 1952, but went through a string of modifications until July 1954 and then waited half a year for its TV-12 engines, the direct forerunner of the NK-12, which were tested on the Tu-4 testbed until December 1954. It first flew on 16 February 1955 with Mikhail Nyukhtikov at the controls, and its tests ran until 20 January 1956. In the 1955-1956 state trials, at a take-off weight of 167,200 kg, it reached 882 km/h, a record for a propeller-driven aircraft, and a practical range of 15,040 km. The decision to put it into series production was taken in summer 1955, before factory testing was complete.

Production was entrusted to Plant No. 18 at Kuibyshev, where a branch of the design bureau was set up in 1956. The first series Tu-95 was completed in August 1955 with a fuselage 2 m longer than the 95-2's, and the first two fully equipped aircraft began flight tests in October 1955. With a 5,000 kg load the production bomber reached 850 km/h, a service ceiling of 10,200 m and a range of 12,100 km, and its maximum take-off weight was 172,000 kg. The 14.2 m bomb bay was sized for 9,000 kg of bombs at maximum design range, and defence rested on six AM-23 cannon in radar-directed turrets. It was the only Bear never fitted with a nose refuelling probe. According to the Russian Wikipedia, 30 series aircraft were built between 1954 and 1957, one of them (No. 5800303) for static testing; MilitaryFactory also describes a Tu-95A sub-series adapted for nuclear weapons, with a temperature-controlled bomb bay, windscreen visors and white anti-flash undersides.

In the West the aircraft was long known as the Tu-20, its original Air Force designation, and NATO named it Bear-A. Tu-95s appeared in the rehearsals for the 1 May 1955 flypast. Long-Range Aviation received the type in 1956, the year the 106th Heavy Bomber Air Division, the first equipped with the Tu-95, was formed under twice Hero of the Soviet Union A. G. Molodchi. The first series went on to very different fates: three aircraft (Nos. 4800001, 4800002 and 6800404) became Tu-95K missile carriers, No. 5800101 was rebuilt as the Tu-95RS, No. 6800402 became the Tu-116 registered CCCP-76462, and No. 5800302, of the 1023rd Heavy Bomber Regiment, was adapted to carry the AN602 thermonuclear superbomb. Western sources add that many Bear-As were converted to the missile-carrying Bear-B configuration and that around a dozen ended up as Tu-95U trainers.