It was nearly 27 metres of gleaming Soviet ambition — a needle-nosed, missile-armed interceptor built to swat American bombers out of the stratosphere. On 16 July 1956 the Lavochkin La-250 lifted off for the first time, rolled uncontrollably, and slammed back onto a field within seconds.

That opening disaster set the tone. Over the next three years the aircraft that earned the nickname “Anaconda” would crash, cripple itself on landing, and defeat some of the Soviet Union’s best test pilots — before being quietly abandoned in 1959. It was the last aircraft the great Lavochkin design bureau would ever build.

A missileer for the bomber age

In 1954 the Soviet Union, staring at fleets of American strategic bombers, called for a heavy interceptor that could reach far out over its vast borders and destroy the intruders with guided missiles alone — no guns. Lavochkin’s answer was the “Interceptor 250”, the heart of a whole weapons system called Kompleks K-15: the aircraft, a pair of big beam-riding K-15 air-to-air missiles, a ground-control radar network codenamed Uragan (Hurricane), and a powerful onboard radar in that long pointed nose.

The result was enormous. At nearly 27 metres long, the slim, sinuous fuselage gave the aircraft its nickname — and, fatally, gave its pilot almost no view forward for landing.

The plane that fought its own pilots

The trouble started at the very beginning. Seconds after Kochetkov left the runway on that first flight, the aircraft began rolling in a way he could not correct. The culprit was the powered control system: its response lagged and then over-corrected, so the pilot’s inputs and the aircraft’s motion fell fatally out of step. He wrestled it down into a field and walked away with minor injuries.

A redesign followed. The La-250A swapped the original swept wing for a delta and moved the missiles to underwing pylons. It did not cure the curse. One prototype was wrecked in a landing accident in November 1957, another crippled the same way in September 1958. The chronic problem — that hopeless forward view over the long nose — kept turning routine landings into gambles.

The end of a dynasty

On paper the Anaconda was formidable — roughly Mach 1.9, a ceiling near 56,000 feet, and the reach to meet bombers far from Soviet cities. In practice, five aircraft delivered nothing but accidents and unreliable equipment, and in 1959 the whole programme — interceptor and missile alike — was cancelled.

The mission the La-250 could not fulfil soon passed to the Tupolev Tu-128 and the Sukhoi Su-9/Su-11 — and, in time, to the surface-to-air missile. Semyon Lavochkin, whose fighters had helped win the Great Patriotic War, did not live to see even that; he died in 1960. The Anaconda, preserved today at Monino, remains his bureau’s last, doomed word in aircraft design.

Sources: Military Factory; Wikipedia; zona-militar.com; Yefim Gordon, Soviet X-Planes (reference).