TU-95MS – Soviet Bomber | Hacker News Reader

TU-95MS – Soviet Bomber

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154 pointsvarmais115 comments

It took me only a few seconds to find on Google Maps: https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=46.921164,32.083704&spn=0.00...

Looks like it has a few siblings, so what you're getting is not as exclusive as you might think...

That explains the pictures on the eBay auction appearing to be from different fuselages - they actually are (the two rightmost ones on Google Maps).

EDIT: Hmmm, maybe not. Perhaps it's the same plane in different locations, I can't be sure.

Do you have something that helps you search Google Maps or are you just good at doing it manually?

I was hoping you'd ask! It was luck. I had noticed signs of a civilian airport in the background of one of the pictures. When I looked at Nikolayev on Google Maps (I was wondering how close to Crimea these ports mentioned in the eBay auction are) I noticed the airport and zoomed in.

In other words you found one TU-95 soviet bomber out of the 500+ built. And you know it is the same plane... why?

The background, the patterns of the tiles on the ground, the buildings all match. The pictures were taken in that location.

I see only two are actual Tu-95s intact and one more in pieces. The others are probably IL-76s.

It could be that only one is legally for sale.

How did you find this?

The airfield is really easy to spot if search for Nikolaiev.

Wow, this is my city! What you found is military airfield Kulbakine, it is functioning (I hear/see jet training flights from time to time).

On a tangent, how much do you notice the political tensions in your everyday life? I read some accounts by people from Odessa who said they didn't bother much and saw as their first priority that nobody died no matter on what side. Are you still far enough away from the Crimea to ignore everything if you chose to do so?

Also I'm wondering if people will give you strange looks exporting a 4-engine military aircraft out of Ukraine these days. That'd certainly be fun to try.

We're almost bordering Crimea, but Crimea is an autonomy, so what happens there is more or less confined. You can ignore politics here if you choose to do so, but unfortunately you can't ignore economic repercussions of it. Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income).

As for tensions, our city is pretty much evenly split up pro-russian/anti-russian. Majority of people I know is anti-russian, but this is probably demographics bias, because older people (who lived half of their life in USSR) are mostly pro-russian. But you won't see many fights here over this. In everyday life when someone mentions they are from one camp and someone from another, we usually just laugh it off and change theme. Some extremists do escalate the conflict, but they're not good people anyway, no matter what side they're taking.

I've witnessed one episode recently when playing at trivia competition with my team. It's split up to pro-russian/anti-russian, just like our city, but we just joke casually about each other and that's it. One of the pro-russian members is a world-class athlete. She took part in world championship on behalf of Ukraine and came to this trivia competition in national athletics team's suit. One of the anti-russian people from other team was shouting to her that she does not deserve to wear this suit, because she's pro-russian and hence anti-ukrainian. But that's just nonsense, because she earned the right to wear this suit more than anyone else in that room. Fortunately, this was one of just few exceptions. So what you read about people in Odessa is true for people in Nikolayev - majority here value respect for each other more than political beliefs.

"... Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income)."

Evgenuiz;

Are you, or have you news, if bitcoin, or other e-currency, is being used, becoming popular as an alternative to your "...you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card", etc?

I found the source of the photo: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/27416195

Not convinced that the auction is legit.

By the way, the American version (military aviation graveyard) of this is pretty fun to look around at too:

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1572109,-110.8374108,4128m/d...

Apropos of the A-10 [1] discussion earlier, there are a few Thunderbolts scattered around.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7354214

It is even more fun to head over there and get a tour through the graveyard. Actual pilots of some of those birds give the tours and they know many of these planes very well.

There is an area there where the airplanes are scraped out https://www.google.com/maps/@32.1594878,-110.8272291,81m/dat...

I love the restrictions in Shipping and Handling:

"Ships worldwide. Excludes: Africa, Central America and Caribbean, Oceania, Southeast Asia, South America, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan Republic, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russian Federation, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Yemen, Bermuda, Mexico, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Republic of, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia."

I wonder why, for example, Slovakia and Hungary are excluded while Czechia and Poland are not.

I scanned the list to see if North Korea was on there... its not. Great deal for aspiring dictators and human rights violators!

Like the previous owners.

An ad for a Soviet Bomber, with the description in Comic Sans, followed by a verbatim dump of the TU-95MS Wikipedia page.

But the seller has an excellent rating, so it's probably legit.

welcome to bitcoin.

I think my comment is extremely fair. If this is in someone's possession, there's no reason a photo on a Tor site can't sell it.

And a German mobile number to contact for any questions you still have, even after reading the copy/pasted Wikipedia article, if you're really daft.

"The airplane is not ready to fly. It is necessary to make a technical service and prolongation of the data limit."

Guessing something got lost in translation. In any case. as aircraft maintenance isn't my area, any idea how viable/costly it is to get airworthy? Could you even get spare parts anymore?

its an open-ended question/answer, honestly.

Spare parts are probably attainable (there's a reason retired aircraft are mothballed rather than scrapped), and the major companies that the built the engines, etc, are still around.

Out of 500 or built ~60 are still in service. Getting parts as a civilian operator might be touchy though. It's probably being sold more as a museum piece.

In terms of doing a restoration Russian stuff is usually pretty viable since mechnically they're fairly straightfoward and rugged, and not much in the way of computers or microelectronics of any kind. Even with all that said, it would probably be a $10M+ (quite possibly +++) to get it airworthy again, and even if you did it would be very expensive. Fuel burn on those things is about 2000 gph, and Jet-A is currently ~$6/gal, so you're looking at $12k/hr just in fuel expenses. Maintenance will probably at least double that hourly figure.

I can vouch for this. A friend has a mig that's going to a museum, and they're gonna restore it to museum cond.

FYI never tell or show anyone you own a jet in storage or it will be likely robbed of flight / nav gear. High security storage is a must.

> FYI never tell or show anyone you own a jet in storage or it will be likely robbed of flight / nav gear. High security storage is a must.

Is there a story behind this? If it is interesting, can we hear it?

I volunteered for an Air Force museum and even non-operational/replica parts were expensive and hard to find for aircraft. I would imagine getting this certified/flyable would cost nearly as much as the purchase price when the dust settles.

Seems like a 3d printing niche opportunity.

Not really. It would NEVER be certified for US commercial operations as the US FAA does not have a reciprocal airworthyness agreement with the Soviets[1]. FAA certification - required for commercial use (but not experimental, which is how old warbirds are generally operated these days) would take years and probably $100M+, fi the FAA would ever even consider it.

[1] Ironically, we DO have such an agreement with Poland, so in some cases (but not the TU-95), aircraft built in Poland have a path towards approval for US ops that those built elsewhere in the USSR wouldn't have.

Oh sorry - it was the bit about non-operational/replica parts that caught my eye. I agree that even the best laser sintering is probably way below the mechanical tolerances required for aeronautics applications, but it seems like it would be a great way to build models and do things like engine cutaways etc.

Ekhm, let me correct that slip: " in Poland [...] elsewhere in the USSR". Poland was fortunately never part of the USSR and hopefully never becomes even in USSR 2.0

"Our partner in the Ukraine have acquired an aircraft..."

Seems legit.

Yep, especially "THE Ukraine" part.

That actually used to be the proper way to refer to the country in English, but has since fallen out of common parlance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine#cite_note-merriam-webst...

At some point, it was decided that 'The Ukraine' referred to the Soviet state and 'Ukraine' to the free country.

So, probably switching back to "The Ukraine" soon then ;)

No.

Joke

--------

You

Used to. There used to be slaves, but it does not mean that it's acceptable to enslave people now. While slavery and saying "the Ukraine" is not the same, the latter shows the clear lack of geopolitical knowledge.

I understand the point, and I think it is good to correct people when they refer to Ukraine incorrectly.

However, comparing a (typically accidental) prepended word to slavery makes me recoil from your argument. I think it is similar to "Reductio ad Hitlerum"[1]. People who refer to the current country as "The Ukraine" are incorrect, but saying that they are implicitly supporting the history of that name is overreaching.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

I don't think most westerners even associate anything particularly problematic with a prepended "the". It's used in "the Netherlands" for similar historical reasons; like the Ukraine, the Netherlands was a descriptive term for a certain region before it was a sovereign state (the Ukraine meaning the borderlands, and the Netherlands meaning the low countries). Whether it's retained or not when the region became a sovereign state seems more or less arbitrary.

The best part of this listing is that they accept "Cash in person".

"Our partner in the Ukraine have acquired an aircraft of type the TU-95"

Hopefully the auction ends before it's repossessed by its "original owners" who are closing in fast....

there is a reason why US and the others were rushing for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons 20 years ago :) See Lord of War too.

Interesting how recent developments continue to show the difference between how countries are treated when they have nuclear weapons vs. when they don't have, like North Korea vs. Iraq. Looking at Ukraine i wonder what Iran think :)

To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade. Seoul being with range of massive amounts of North Korean artillery is one. The concern of both China and South Korea about the potential for floods of refugees is another.

The most important thing is that China supports NK for ideological reasons. Sure, China would prefer a communist regime that isn't quite as well suited to parody, but it'll take whatever communist regime it gets for propaganda and ideological reasons.

China doesn't care about ideology. It cares about having a buffer state instead of US troops on its borders.

But I'm convinced if at all, only very reluctantly so - certanly not so over an ideology whose championing stands to benefit not those of Deng Xiaoping's orthodoxy but of Maoist irredentism (Hua Guofeng may only be relevant as a historical footnote dominated by currents with consderably more inertia now, but Bo Xilai certainly seemed to have justified a thorough purging. At the very least I'm confident enough to estabish that faction-on-faction maneuvering in the far past has been justified on ideological differences of a similar magnitude - and that we looked at Bo's dramatics for shades of that precedent.)

> To be fair, there are many reasons why North Korea was left alone while Iraq was considered "safer" to invade.

Many reasons why Iraq was considered more important to invaded, and all of those reasons are "barrels of oil", as elucidated in 2003 by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "Look, the primarily [sic] difference -- to put it a little too simply -- between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil." [1]

[1] http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcrip...

I don't think you're reading Wolfowitz's quote properly. He's saying that the U.S. has leverage over North Korea because their economy is in such a poor state, leverage it didn't have over Iraq because of their oil reserves.

If you're claiming the U.S. would be likely to invade North Korea if they had significant oil reserves, that's wrong. As Wolfowitz says in the context around your quote:

The concern about implosion is not primarily at all a matter of the weapons that North Korea has, but a fear particularly by South Korea and also to some extent China of what the larger implications are for them of having 20 million people on their borders in a state of potential collapse and anarchy.

...

In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.

Hard to draw from this that the "only" reason invading Iraq was more important was oil. The lack of economic leverage made a military option relatively more practical, as did the military and social situation of Iraq vis a vis its neighbors.

For anyone else who was curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra-rotating_propellers

- Seller writes "u" and "dissamble" in "We can therefore dissamble the Plane so u can get one or all of the turbines exclusively"

- Price tag of US $3,000,000.

Well, I'm convinced. Here is my credit card!

Sorry, cash in person only.

But I'd need a T-72 to transport all that cash!

Did people raid the Poltava Museum of Long-Range Aviation? According to wikipedia it has the only Tu-95 in Ukraine (as well as a Tu-160, in case you want a supersonic strategic bomber)

on the former USSR territories it is called "privatization". Sooner or later it happens to anything there...

Well, there are 3 Tu-95s on the Google Maps link in the top comment.

Item specifics Condition: Used

Seemed funny to me.

I too often buy military surplus hardware from ebay sites in Comic Sans.

If I bought this, I would totally convert it into a bar.

You can't beat museum opened inside a nuclear silo. And that one is 2-3 hours from where I live :)

a good rule of thumb for warbirds is that however much it costs you to buy it is about how much it will cost you per year afterwards to keep it flying.

I have a vague sense of playing Eve Online when I see a Soviet bomber for 3M on EBay.

That is a fine piece of hardware. what would restoration cost? How do you even restore it ? spare parts, technicians on the Tu-95MS are probably not in ample supply.

I would imagine that as far as expertise goes, a seasoned mechanic in that field could work nearly as well with this aircraft as any other, much the same way our own expertise in computer hardware might translate across varying brands and models, gotchas and idiosyncrasies aside.

One main issue with owning aircraft like this is not the cost to get it ready to fly from its current state but maintaining it to fly. In the air-force you normally have large mechanic teams that are dedicated to the aircraft. As soon as it lands its taken to the hanger and the teams get to work on it. These are not your normal cessnas where you land, tie down, then come back a week later and throw gas in and go. As soon as these planes land, there is stuff that is broken or needs fixed/tuned each time. You will end up employing an entire team to keep this air worthy. This is the same issue you find with older migs for sale and why they are so cheap.

More info:

MS stands for Maritime Strike

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Bear.html

"The plane was manufactured in 1987 and has been flown 454 hours and 24 Minutes of the estimated 5000 hours it is capable off."

Anyone know why there is a 5000 hour limit?

Probably before the next round of maintenance.

The maintenance service costs at that number of flight hours probably exceeds it's economic value.

Yup. It's purely badass value.

The aluminum skin and wings fatigue.

It's more a certain number of takeoff and landings rather than flight time. After that the metal is too weak and unsafe.

Each time the cabin pressure changes the skin moves. Each time it takes off or lands the wings flex. They probably flex during flight as well.

First link I found: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/04/aircraft_fati...

That still doesn't explain the low total time limit. 5000 hours is low compared to the typical 50000+ hours that modern jets are rated for.

Modern jets aren't prop-driven Soviet strategic bombers. They are typically built for comfortable, cost-effective, long-term operation, not to be a credible threat to deter (or carry out) a life-or-death war with an economically far more advanced adversary.

They are probably referring to the engines. Engines are rated in hours.

454 hours of flight time seems low for a military plane built in the 80's. That is not very many flights from the Soviet Union to off the U.S. coastline.

there is a TU variant with swept wings, var geometry, and jet engines that replaced this plane that most Russian republics use

> there is a TU variant with swept wings, var geometry, and jet engines that replaced this plane that most Russian republics use

"Most Russian republics"? So, more than half of the 1?

And "Tu" is just an abbreviation for Tupolev, its not a particular plane of which there are variants. Saying a "TU variant" is like saying a Boeing variant.

And there are two different Tupolev strategic bombers that meet that general description (the Tu-22 and Tu-160), neither of which is a variant of the Bear.

More than half of the 21 actually. Russia is a federation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republics_of_Russia

> More than half of the 21 actually.

So, name the 11 that have militaries that employ the bombers in question.

No idea. I was just correcting the notion that there is only one "Russian republic".

I guess with this line of thought, the US has 50 different militaries.

Many Soviet vehicles and aircraft weren't of great build quality so they tended to have training vehicles that would be used by many crews until they fell apart, and vehicles reserved for combat.

This aircraft was built in '87, by which time the Soviet economy was in serious trouble and training was at reduced levels. The Bear always projected a scarier image than was reality.

The US manufactured that image for its own purposes.

The Soviet Union manufactured that image for deterrence/intimidation/diverting-of-US-energy purposes.

The US military-industrial complex amplified it for pocket-lining purposes.

Separating movie portrayals and actual mindset...

Wouldn't the MIC over-emphasize Russian reliability whereas the rank-and-file tend to underestimate it?

Further, wouldn't RU do more or less the same, substituting design bureaus?

If it's legit, I wonder if it is a kind of retaliation for the invasion of Crimea or if the country is just broke and need cash.

"Our partner in the Ukraine have acquired an aircraft of type the TU- 95MS"

Uhm.....

To be fair, it is a pretty fast prop plane if restored.

"Payments: Cash in person"

How convenient that one can just post the spoils of war on ebay now.

I know, right? The kind of things they sell on eBay nowadays. Say, some woman sold her virginity http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/after-woman-sell... I thought that would be illegal.

Anyone wanna go halfsies?

Would Russia sell me a Tu-160 for the right price?

Wonder how it would be "shipped"

Maybe a few of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Beluga

They say that it can be shipped to Nikolayev and Odessa, so it can be literally shipped with a ship, because these cities have large ports.

obvious question, is there a picture of the tail with the plane number?

Than sometimes you can pull up the air flight history

That's a good purchase, Satoshi.

I dig the details regarding shipping.

Very appropriate typeface selection

Does preloaded cargo included?

What were you expecting, one of these?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

Ukraine does not have any nuclear weapons now.

Definitely not, Russian moves confirm it.

Any idea if the partial reunification will happen?

Comic Sans is a nice touch.

weird that it doesn't say they're open for a bitcoin price.

Yeah, they only take plutonium and heroin. Might be sketchy.

put it on Pawn Stars

  ...yeah, sure, let me just call my buddy who used to be a mechanic for Tupolev.

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