AS A CHILD OF THE PROPELLER AGE AND A PILOT WHO FOR 40 YEARS FLEW AIRPLANES WITH PROPS, FOR ME THE MARK OF MUSCLE IS NOT A TAILPIPE TWINKLING LIKE A STOVETOP BURNER BUT THE BIG SILVER DISC OF THOSE WHIRLING WINGS CALLED PROPELLERS.
Corsair, Bearcat, Thunderbolt, Sea Fury—the bigger the better. So Bear with me while I rhapsodize over the immensity and power of that Russian behemoth, the eight-prop Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber codenamed the Bear. (Yes, eight props: four turbine engines powering two contrarotating propellers per engine.) To me, the Tu-95 is the picture of power as its propellers pound the air into submission. oped a fleet of long-range strategic bombers. Why bother? Their enemy, Germany, was only a few hours’ flying time from Soviet territory, and no water intervened. By the time the USSR realized that its next opponent would be across an ocean, a solution literally fell into its lap: the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, three examples of which had landed in Siberia with battle damage or empty fuel tanks after raids on Japan.
Andrei Tupolev, the Soviet aeronautical engineer whose career veered between gulag and greatness, was assigned the task of reverse-engineering the big Boeing to metric standards so that his factory could build replicas that would become the Soviet Union’s first long-range bombers. Tupolev wasn’t proud of copycatting, and he tried to name what would become the Tu-4 the B-4. Ultimately, his factories built 847 Superfortskis, which served the Russians well into the 1960s.
Working with that big American airplane gave Tupolev a boost up what would otherwise have been a steep learning curve. Yet Tupolev’s sophisticated turbojet bombers—Badger, Blinder, Backfire, Blackjack—never achieved the notoriety of his greatest creation, the turboprop Bear.
In the early1950s, when work on the Bear began, pure jet engines had lousy legs. Though they were
