For its crews, a Tu-142 mission was a marathon. The aircraft would fly out for many hours to a search area in the Atlantic, the Norwegian Sea or the Pacific, lay patterns of sonobuoys, and try to hold contact with a submarine designed above all to remain unheard. The results were hard won.

The early sensor suite was not good enough, and successive versions added better equipment: the Korshun search and targeting system on the Tu-142MK, improved NK-12MP engines on the Tu-142M3, and the Zarechye acoustic system on the Tu-142MZ. Each generation could search more water and track quieter boats. The race never ended, because American submarines kept getting quieter too.

The Tu-142’s range also made it a political tool. Deployments to friendly airfields abroad, reported by Western observers from Cuba to Vietnam, showed Soviet reach, and a Bear flying down the American east coast or along the Norwegian coast became one of the most familiar images of the Cold War.

India became the type’s only export customer. Eight Tu-142MK-E aircraft, an export version with some systems downgraded, were bought for the Indian Navy, and the first three arrived at INS Hansa in Goa on 30 March 1988. They equipped INAS 312, the “Albatrosses”, which moved to INS Rajali at Arakkonam in Tamil Nadu in 1992.

For an Indian Navy watching a vast ocean, the Tu-142 brought a reach no other aircraft in the region could match. Within months of arrival it was in action: in November 1988, during Operation Cactus, Indian Tu-142s helped search for the ship in which mercenaries fled the Maldives and direct Indian frigates to it. Over the next three decades the Albatrosses flew long-range surveillance and anti-submarine missions across the Indian Ocean.

Supporting a small fleet of huge Soviet aircraft grew harder over time, and India bought the Boeing P-8I as their replacement. The last three Tu-142s were retired on 29 March 2017, after 29 years. One became a museum on the Beach Road in Visakhapatnam, opposite the INS Kursura submarine museum.

A Tu-142 carries a crew of about eleven to thirteen: pilots, navigators, a flight engineer, radio and radar operators, acoustic operators and a tail gunner. The mission system integrates a search radar, sonobuoy receivers and processing, magnetic anomaly detection and navigation equipment so that contacts can be localised and attacked with homing torpedoes or depth charges.

Later versions continued to evolve. Russia has fitted the Gefest SVP-24 targeting system to improve weapons accuracy, and Jane’s reported plans to link Northern Fleet Tu-142s by datalink with Forpost drones so that unmanned aircraft could pass targeting data to the patrol aircraft. The basic airframe, however, is still that of a 1960s design flying on engines conceived in the 1950s.

• Tu-142: initial anti-submarine version, early aircraft with twelve-wheel main bogies.
• Tu-142M: stretched forward fuselage and improved cockpit.
• Tu-142MK: new Korshun search and targeting system.
• Tu-142MK-E: export version for India, eight delivered from 1988.
• Tu-142M3: improved version with NK-12MP engines and upgraded avionics.
• Tu-142MZ: final anti-submarine production version with the Zarechye acoustic system.
• Tu-142MR “Bear-J”: submarine communications relay aircraft with a trailing wire VLF aerial.

Russia does not publish operating costs for the Tu-142. It is a heavy four-engined aircraft with a large crew, burning a great deal of fuel on missions that can last more than twelve hours, and its NK-12 engines and contra-rotating gearboxes are complex to maintain. India’s experience showed how hard it could be to keep a small export fleet supported over three decades. Any hourly figure is therefore an estimate; tens of thousands of dollars per hour is a fair order of magnitude for an aircraft of this class.