The Yakovlev Yak-141: the first supersonic jump-jet fighter to fly

What makes the Yak-141 special

Full Yakovlev Yak-141 specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe the Yak-41M as flown in 1991 — the two flying prototypes, izdeliye 48-2 (board 75) and izdeliye 48-3 (board 77), the latter being the pre-production standard. Deltas for the Yak-38 it was meant to replace, for the projected production Yak-141M, for the land-based Yak-43 and for the mid-1990s Yak-201 study are in grey. Four warnings before any number is read. First, this aircraft never completed state acceptance trials, so almost nothing here is a certified figure; the numbers come from Yakovlev publicity, from the bureau history and from Russian journal accounts written after the fact, and they do not always agree. Second, the aeroplane has two of almost every weight and performance figure, one for a vertical take-off and one for a 120 m rolling take-off, and sources routinely quote the better of the pair without saying which it is — a habit that makes the Yak-141 look about 3,700 kg more capable than it was in its defining mode of operation. Third, the widely repeated claim that this was the first supersonic VTOL aircraft to fly is not correct as usually stated; the EWR VJ 101C X-2 exceeded Mach 1 on 29 July 1964 and the Dassault Mirage IIIV reached Mach 2.04 on 12 September 1966. What the Yak-141 can properly claim is to be the first supersonic vertical-take-off aircraft built as a weapon rather than as a research machine, the first aircraft of any kind to fly with a three-bearing swivel nozzle, and the only supersonic VTOL type to have operated from a ship before the F-35B. Fourth, English-language reference works disagree with Russian ones on ceiling, ferry range and dry thrust; where they do, both figures are given.

Armament & payload

The Yak-141 could carry 2,600 kg only if it refused to take off vertically

The armament of the Yak-141 is a straightforward late-Soviet fighter fit — a GSh-30-1 cannon, four underwing pylons and a centreline station, the same missiles the MiG-29 and Su-27 were carrying — and the interesting thing about it is not the weapons but the arithmetic. Maximum external load was 2,600 kg after a 120 m rolling take-off. Take off vertically and it fell to 1,000 kg, because 3,700 kg of the aircraft’s permissible weight had been spent on the privilege of leaving the deck without moving. That is the same trade the Harrier makes and the F-35B makes; the difference is that the Yak carried two lift engines that were dead weight, dead volume and dead drag for every minute of the rest of the sortie.

Against the Yak-38 it replaced, the improvement was enormous and should not be understated. The Yak-38 had no radar at all and could attack only what the pilot could see; the Yak-141 had a Zhuk-class set that could find a fighter at 80 km and a patrol boat at 110, track ten contacts and engage four. The Yak-38 carried a thousand kilogrammes to a radius of about a hundred kilometres; the Yak-141 carried more than twice that to six or nine times the distance and could go supersonic to get there. For the first time a Soviet ship without a catapult had the prospect of a real fleet air-defence fighter rather than an armed curiosity.

Set against what it would actually have met, the picture is less flattering. A Sea Harrier FRS.2 with AMRAAM was subsonic but had a proper look-down radar and vastly more operational maturity; an F/A-18 from a catapult deck carried more, further, from a ship that could also launch tankers and airborne early warning. And the weapons integration was never finished. In 1991 the ground rig at Zhukovsky was still being used to measure whether stores hung under the wing would overheat or cook off in the efflux during a vertical landing — a question that tells you exactly how far from service the aircraft was. Not one weapon of any kind was ever fired from a Yak-141. Every store listed below is a design provision or a rig-tested clearance; the only things ever carried aloft were drop tanks, ballast and dummy rounds — and it was mock missiles on the pylons that helped make Yakimov’s aircraft the heavier of the two on the day it was lost.

Sourcing caveat: no Yak-141 weapon fit was ever certified, because the aircraft never reached state acceptance trials. The lists above are compiled from the Yakovlev bureau history, from Lev Berne’s series in Krylya Rodiny (1994) and from Yefim Gordon’s Soviet Jump Jets (2008); loadout combinations follow the bureau’s own published armament diagram. Weights and ranges quoted for individual missiles are generic type figures, not Yak-141 clearances.

Variants

Yakovlev drew a supersonic jump jet for eighteen years, built four, and flew two

The Yak-141 has a confusing designation history for a type that never entered service, and most of the confusion is deliberate. Work began as the Yak-41, izdeliye 48, in 1975. When the requirement was rewritten in 1986 to make the aircraft multirole, it became the Yak-41M, izdeliye 48M. The designation Yak-141 appears from about 1988 and was used publicly from 1991 — partly, according to the bureau history, because the true designation was classified when the record claims were filed with the FAI, and partly because a new number disguised how badly the programme had slipped against a decree that had promised state trials in 1982.

The four airframes were not four aeroplanes in any useful sense. One was a static-test specimen. One was a ground rig that never flew, spending years on a forces-and-moments stand measuring what the three engines’ efflux did to the aircraft’s own skin. Only two flew, and between them they completed just over 250 flights before the money ran out — barely more than a modern fighter programme flies in a good quarter.

The list below includes the paper derivatives, because in this programme the paper matters. Two of them are directly relevant to the F-35 question: the Yak-43, which kept the lift jets, and the Yak-201, which abandoned them for a shaft-driven lift fan — Yakovlev’s own engineers concluding, by the mid-1990s, that the arrangement they had spent two decades perfecting was the wrong one.

Yak-41 (izdeliye 48, 1975–1986, none completed)

The original supersonic carrier interceptor, authorised by decree in November 1977 with state trials promised for 1982. A March 1979 draft project used the R-79V-300 alone; the Ministry of Defence commission instead directed a combined installation with two lift engines, and the requirement was then rewritten repeatedly — to a strike aircraft, back to a fighter, then to a multirole machine.

Yak-41UT (izdeliye 48U, ordered 1977 and again 1986, none built)

Two-seat conversion trainer with a lengthened fuselage and tandem cockpits. Ordered twice, funded neither time; also referred to as the Yak-41UB. Its absence mattered: converting squadron pilots onto a jet-lift fighter without a two-seater is close to impossible, as the Yak-38 programme had already demonstrated.

VTOL carrier attack aircraft (technical proposal 1978, dropped 1986)

A shipborne strike derivative studied on the Yak-41 airframe under the same 1977 decree. Work stopped when the May 1986 decree consolidated everything into the multirole Yak-41M.

Yak-39 (from 1979, cancelled 1985, none built)

Not a Yak-141 variant but its subsonic rival inside the same bureau: a radar-equipped multirole development of the Yak-38 with the R-28V-300, greater fuel and vectoring lift-engine nozzles. Cancelled in favour of the supersonic aircraft — a decision that left Soviet naval aviation with nothing at all when the Yak-41M failed.

Yak-41M / Yak-141 (izdeliye 48M, 1986–1991, 4 built)

The aircraft that was actually constructed: multirole, gun-armed, cleared for shipboard and land operation. Izdeliye 48-1 (board 48) was the ground rig, completed in the first quarter of 1984; 48SI was the static specimen, assembled July 1986; 48-2 (board 75) was the first flying aircraft, completed December 1985 and first flown 9 March 1987; 48-3 (board 77) was the pre-production machine, completed June 1987 and first flown 2 April 1989.

Yak-141M (project, early 1990s, none built)

Proposed production standard with enlarged leading-edge root extensions, a reworked avionics suite including multifunction displays and the helmet sight, and improved radius and payload. Saratov Aviation Plant had costed the production cycle at 420 days and put the aircraft’s complexity at 1.7 times that of a MiG-29 before preparation was stopped for lack of funds at the end of 1991.

Yak-43 (izdeliye 201, late 1980s, project only)

Land-based short-take-off derivative with a larger wing and a single Kuznetsov NK-32 — the 25,000 kgf engine of the Tu-160 bomber — fitted with a swivel nozzle, the lift jets deleted or reduced. Some English sources give the engine as the NK-321 and treat the designation izdeliye 201 as belonging to the Yak-201 instead; the Russian bureau accounts attach it to the Yak-43.

Yak-201 (mid-1990s, project only)

A fifth-generation canard design with low-observable shaping, drawn on Yakovlev’s own initiative and at its own expense, offered unsuccessfully into the Russian light fighter competition. Its propulsion is the point: a new 17,500 kgf main engine driving a mechanical shaft to a lift fan, with a projected 21,500 kg lift weight and 4,200 kg of stores. Yakovlev had reached the F-35B’s architecture on its own, and could not fund it.

Lockheed-Yakovlev proposal (announced 1992, none built)

Under the partnership announced at Farnborough on 6 September 1992 and confirmed by Lockheed in June 1994, three further flying prototypes and a new static article were to be built, one of them a two-seater, all at increased gross weight. No metal was ever cut. Reported dates for the collaboration run from 1991 to 1997, and Russian naval-aviation histories state that in 1995, with government permission, the bureau sold the Americans its complete Yak-38 and Yak-141 documentation.

Survivors and their locations, precisely. Two original airframes survive, both flying prototypes, and there are no reproductions. Izdeliye 48-2, the first flying aircraft, flew the Farnborough displays of September 1992 wearing the number 141, appeared statically at MAKS in 1993 and 1995, stood for years in the Yakovlev design bureau museum and was transferred in July 2009 to the Vadim Zadorozhny Museum of Technology at Arkhangelskoye outside Moscow, where it is displayed in grey with its original board number 75 restored and dummy R-73 and R-27R rounds on the pylons. Izdeliye 48-3, the pre-production aircraft wrecked on 5 October 1991, was rebuilt as a museum exhibit — reportedly using the tail section of the ground-rig aircraft 48-1 — and is at the Central Air Force Museum, Monino; it has no engine, which is the visible scar of the accident. Note that English-language references, including Wikipedia, still list this aircraft as being at the Yakovlev bureau museum, which has been out of date since 2009, and some photograph captions reverse the two identities. Of the other two airframes, the ground rig 48-1 is unaccounted for apart from its tail, and the location and condition of the static specimen 48SI are unknown.

From the Forger’s shortcomings to a cancelled prototype

Twelve Yak-141 Freestyle stories

The Yak-141 Freestyle in pictures

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Where the Yak-141 was built and flown

A record measured in firsts, not combat

The Yak-141 never entered service and never saw combat — it existed only as four prototypes. Its record is therefore one of engineering milestones rather than kills: it was the first supersonic vertical-takeoff fighter design to fly, it set a series of vertical-takeoff records in 1991, and it demonstrated the rotating-nozzle propulsion later echoed — contentiously — in the F-35B. Its programme ended not in battle but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which erased the funding and the carriers it was built to serve.

See the wider combat record of every military aircraft. The Yak-141 carries no combat record; it is presented here as the prototype it remained.

Everything people ask about the Yak-141 Freestyle

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Every fact, checked

• MilitaryFactory — Yakovlev Yak-41 (Freestyle)Dimensions, weights, R-79 and RD-41 engines, prototype count and the flight-test dates.
• AeroCorner — Yakovlev Yak-141Specifications, weights, fuel and performance figures for the prototype.
• The National Interest — the Yak-41 and the F-35BThe Lockheed partnership and a sceptical view of the F-35B influence claim.
• Simple Flying — the Soviet supersonic jump-jetThe October 1991 carrier deck accident, cancellation and the Lockheed funding figures.
• GlobalSecurity.org — Yak-141Programme background, propulsion layout and naval requirement.
• Secret Projects Forum — Lockheed Martin and the Yak-141Detailed enthusiast discussion of the contested F-35B lineage and the partnership terms.
• MiGFlug Afterburner — the Yak-141 and the three-bearing nozzleMiGFlug’s own account of the swivel nozzle and the F-35B connection.
• FAI records databaseReference for the 1991 vertical-takeoff climb-and-payload records set by the type.