The Yak-38 Forger: the Soviet Navy’s vertical-takeoff gamble

What makes the Yak-38 Forger special

Yak-38 Forger full specifications

Figures are broadly for the improved Yak-38M; sources vary, and contested values (especially range and combat radius) are hedged. Performance fell sharply in hot or high-altitude conditions.

Baseline note: the figures below describe the Yak-38M (izdeliye 82, factory code VMM) as it stood in Soviet Naval Aviation service in the second half of the 1980s — the last and best of the three production marks, with the uprated Tumansky R-28V-300 lift/cruise engine, two Rybinsk RD-38 lift jets, a steerable nosewheel and, for the first time, underwing drop tanks. Deltas for the original Yak-38, for the two-seat Yak-38U trainer and for the experimental Yak-36 that preceded them all are in grey. Three warnings before any number is read. First, this aircraft has two of almost every weight and payload figure, one for a vertical take-off and one for a rolling take-off along the deck, and reference tables routinely quote the better of the pair without saying which — a habit that flatters the Forger by a full tonne in the mode that defined it. Second, Russian and Western authorities disagree on length, span, empty weight and rated thrust by margins too wide to reconcile quietly; the Soviet Navy’s own 1983 training manual is preferred here where it covers the point, with the Western figure given alongside. Third, every performance number below is a temperate-latitude figure taken at sea level in cool air. In the tropics and over Afghan plateau the powerplant lost as much as 1,500 kgf (3,307 lbf) of thrust, and the aircraft simply could not lift its own permitted weight vertically.

Armament & payload

The Yak-38 carried its entire war on four pylons, and taking off vertically halved what it could lift

Everything the Forger fired or dropped hung outside. There was no internal gun, no internal bay, no radar to cue anything, and four BD3-60-23F1 pylons under a wing of eighteen square metres. The Yak-38M could take 2,000 kg (4,409 lb) after a rolling take-off along the deck and 1,000 kg (2,205 lb) if it went straight up; the Yak-38 managed 1,500 kg and 1,000 kg respectively. Since a vertical launch was the entire justification for the aircraft’s existence, the honest number is the smaller one: a tonne of stores, out to roughly 195 km, in visual conditions, by day.

What that tonne could consist of was also narrower than the catalogue suggests. Soviet aviation in the mid-1970s had no compact long-range anti-ship missile of the Exocet or Sea Eagle class, so the Forger’s only guided weapons were the radio-command Kh-23M and later the Kh-25MR — short-legged rounds that required the pilot to fly towards the target while thumbing a joystick and watching a flare in the tail of his own missile. Against a warship with modern point defence that is an approach to within a few kilometres of something designed to kill aircraft at twenty. The air-to-air fit was two R-60 heat-seekers, adequate for shooting down a maritime patrol aircraft or a helicopter and nothing else.

The comparison that matters is the Sea Harrier, and the Yak-38 loses it on every axis except sea-level dash speed. Where the British aircraft had Blue Fox radar, Sidewinder and eventually Sea Eagle, the Soviet one had an optical gunsight and a pair of gun pods. Russian assessments are unusually blunt about this: one widely repeated verdict is that as a shipboard strike aircraft the Yak-38 was inferior not only to the Harrier but to the Ka-29 assault helicopter, which carried more, went further and broke down less. Weapon fits varied a great deal by mark, by year and by ship. The VSPU-36 ventral gun pack was designed specifically for this aircraft and its testing dragged on until 1988, by which time production was ending; there is no reliable evidence that squadrons ever used it. Nuclear provision existed on paper for the RN-28, RN-40 and RN-41, but there is no public record of a Yak-38 ever carrying one to sea.

Sourcing caveat: the weapon list above comes from the Soviet Navy’s 1983 Yak-38 training manual and from Yefim Gordon’s and Piotr Butowski’s monographs, and it describes what the aircraft was cleared to carry rather than what a given squadron actually loaded. Photographs of Yak-38s at sea show a strikingly narrow real-world repertoire: gun pods, UB-16 rocket pods, practice bombs and, most often, nothing at all. Payload figures differ between Russian and Western tables by up to 500 kg; the split vertical and rolling figures given here follow the Russian training tables, which state both.

Variants

The Yak-38 was the middle member of a family of three Yakovlev jump jets, and the only one to reach a squadron

The line runs from the Yak-36 of 1964, an experimental machine that could barely lift dummy rocket pods, through the Yak-36M of 1970 that became the production Yak-38, to the supersonic Yak-141 that was flying and then was not. It is worth being precise about the middle of that sequence, because the designations overlap confusingly: the aircraft was designed, built, tested, shipped and flown operationally as the Yak-36M, and only became the Yak-38 when it was formally accepted into service by decree No. 644-210, dated 11 August 1977. Almost every photograph captioned "early Yak-38" is a Yak-36M.

Three marks entered production at Saratov, and none of them was what the Navy had wanted. The programme decree of 27 December 1967 had promised a light attack aircraft, a trainer and, in due course, a fighter. The attack aircraft and the trainer were delivered; the fighter never was. The Yak-36P with a radar, the Yak-38I and Yak-38MP multi-role fighters, the Yak-38MTs with Kh-31 and R-77, and the fully worked-out Yak-39 of 1979–1985 all died on the drawing board, and with each cancellation the fleet was left with an aeroplane that could not see beyond its own windscreen.

The type served aboard all four Kiev-class aviation cruisers, whose nominal air group was twelve Yak-38 and sixteen Ka-25 or Ka-27 helicopters, though five to ten aircraft was the usual embarked strength. Kiev sailed for the Northern Fleet on 16 July 1976 with five Yak-38s and one Yak-38U aboard and flew the type off Crete that month, the first appearance of Soviet V/STOL aircraft outside home waters; seven flying periods and 45 hours were logged on that passage. Minsk transferred to the Pacific in 1978–1979, meeting Kiev off Libya on 28 February 1979 for a joint five-aircraft demonstration in front of the US Sixth Fleet, and on the 131-day passage flew 230 sorties in 20 flying periods for 50 hours while engines were swapped between airframes more than fifty times. Novorossiysk ran from the Kola Inlet to Vladivostok between 17 October 1983 and 27 February 1984, flying roughly 600 sorties and proving the rolling take-off in service; the regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Churilov, was made Hero of the Soviet Union for it. Baku, commissioned in December 1987 and renamed Admiral Gorshkov in 1990, operated the type for barely three years before the grounding. Ashore, Yak-38s also landed on the roll-on roll-off ships Agostinho Neto on 14 August 1983 and Nikolai Cherkasov, using heat-resistant AK-9F panels, in trials of dispersed basing modelled on RAF Harrier practice in Germany.

Total output was 231 airframes of all marks between 1974 and 1988, all from the Saratov Aviation Plant, none exported. Forty-eight were lost in accidents and crashes — almost exactly one airframe in five. Eleven of those were fatal, two with test pilots and nine with squadron crews, killing thirteen men.

Yak-36 (izdeliye V; 1962–1967, 4 built)

The experimental predecessor and a different aeroplane in every respect: two R-27-300 turbojets side by side in the nose with rotating nozzles at the centre of gravity, bicycle undercarriage, and a reaction-control nozzle on a long boom out in front. Tethered hovering from 9 January 1963, first conventional flight 27 July 1964, first full vertical circuit 24 March 1966, public debut at Domodedovo in July 1967 with dummy UB-16 pods under the wings. Two of the four flew. NATO called it Freehand; it lifted nothing useful and was never intended to.

Yak-36M (izdeliye VM; 1970–1976, 4 prototypes plus early production)

The real aircraft, conceived by a group under deputy chief designer Stanislav Mordovin working against Alexander Yakovlev’s explicit instruction to leave combined powerplants alone. First free hover 22 September 1970 by Valentin Mukhin, first conventional flight 2 December 1970, first full vertical-to-vertical profile by Mikhail Deksbakh on 25 February 1972, first deck landing aboard the cruiser Moskva on 18 November 1972. Not one prototype was lost in flight test, against three of six Harriers written off in the British programme.

Yak-38 "Forger-A" (izdeliye 86; 1974–1983, roughly 145 including Yak-36M-standard machines)

The production single-seater: R-27V-300 lift/cruise engine of 6,100 kgf, RD-36-35FV and later FVR lift jets, 10,300 kg vertical and 11,300 kg rolling take-off weights, 1,000 kg of stores from a vertical launch. No radar, no internal gun, no drop tanks. Accepted 11 August 1977; the first deployment, aboard Kiev from 16 July 1976, carried five Yak-38s and one Yak-38U.

Yak-38U "Forger-B" (izdeliye 76; 1973–1985, 34 built including one prototype)

The two-seat trainer, and a necessity rather than a luxury: the transition to jet-lift flying defeated a substantial fraction of the pilots sent to it. Both fuselage ends were stretched to fit a second cockpit and hold the centre of gravity, producing an aircraft notoriously banana-shaped in profile. First flight 17 August 1973, in service 15 November 1978. Unarmed, no pylons, ceiling 5,000 m. Its escape system was a world first: forced synchronised ejection of both crew in jet-borne flight, staggered by 0.6 seconds with divergent trajectories. Eight were lost.

Yak-38M "Forger-A" (izdeliye VMM, izdeliye 82; 1983–1988, 2 prototypes and 50 production)

The modernisation this page is baselined on, and the mark that made the aeroplane merely inadequate rather than useless. R-28V-300 and RD-38 engines with roughly a tenth more thrust, widened intakes, a steerable nosewheel, a swivelling rear lift nozzle for rolling take-offs, strengthened underwing pylons and, at last, drop tanks. First flight 18 January 1983, shipboard trials aboard Minsk in spring 1984, in service from June 1985. Soviet assessments credited it with a 15–20 per cent gain in effectiveness over the Yak-38, which tells you how little was on the table.

Yak-36P, Yak-38I, Yak-38MP, Yak-38MTs (1970s–1984, projects only)

Successive attempts to give the airframe a radar and turn it into a fighter. The Yak-36P was a radar-equipped Yak-36M; the Yak-38MP would have used the S-41 fire-control system and a leading-edge root extension in the manner of the AV-8B; the Yak-38MTs of 1983–1984 proposed Kh-31, R-27 and R-77 missiles. None was built, and the planned Yak-38P interceptor was never created — which is why the Soviet Navy’s only fixed-wing shipboard aircraft went through its entire career blind.

Yak-39 (1979–1985, project only)

The serious redesign: a multi-mode radar in an enlarged nose, greater wing area, more internal fuel, a built-in 30 mm cannon, the PRNK-39 nav-attack suite and RD-41 lift engines of 4,100 kgf with vectoring nozzles. Fighter, attack and trainer versions were studied from 1981; prototypes were scheduled for 1984–1986. Quoted radius was 450 km after a 200 m run with a tonne of stores, and 200 km from a vertical take-off. Cancelled in 1985 when the bureau’s effort went to the Yak-141.

Yak-141 (izdeliye 48; 1987–1991, 4 airframes, 2 of them flying)

Not a Yak-38 variant and should never be described as one. A separate supersonic design with a three-bearing swivel nozzle, a radar, 4,400 kg of internal fuel and a 1,800 km/h top speed, intended to replace the Forger aboard Admiral Gorshkov. It flew from that ship in September and October 1991, lost an airframe in a heavy landing on 5 October 1991, never completed state acceptance trials and was abandoned as the Soviet Union dissolved. The Yak-38 was retired with no successor.

Retirement (1989–2004)

Production ended in 1988 and deliveries stopped by the end of 1989. On 25 June 1991 a Yak-38M taking off conventionally at Saky-4 at night lost its canopy, which was ingested and set the engine alight; the pilot could not eject with the canopy locked open, and the seat fired only as the burning aircraft hit the ground. That crash was the formal pretext for an order from the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy in July 1991 suspending Yak-38 operations, and the fleet never flew again. The regiments had already begun re-equipping with Su-25s in the late 1980s. Scrapping ran through the 1990s, and the type was only formally struck off Navy charge in 2004, by which time almost nothing was left to strike.

Operators (1976–1991 Soviet Union; 1992–1990s Ukraine)

Two front-line regiments only — the 279th OKShAP of the Northern Fleet at Severomorsk-3 and the 311th OKShAP of the Pacific Fleet at Pristan — plus the 299th instructor and research regiment at Saky in the Crimea, where both front-line units were formed. Never exported. On the breakup of the Union most airframes stayed with Russia and a handful of training-centre aircraft passed to Ukraine, which flew a few from land bases before withdrawing them.

Closing note on survivors: no Yak-38 of any mark is airworthy anywhere, and none ever will be — nothing survives that could be restored to a flying condition, and no reproduction has ever been built, so every airframe listed below is an original. Roughly thirty are known to exist, all in the former Soviet Union. In Russia: two Yak-38s at the Central Air Force Museum at Monino, one at the Vadim Zadorozhny Museum of Technology at Arkhangelskoye, a Yak-38M at the Northern Fleet aviation museum at Safonovo, examples at the AvtoVAZ technical museum in Tolyatti, the Taganrog aviation museum, Khodynka Field in Moscow, Victory Park in Saratov, Kubinka, Murmansk, Syzran and the former base at Severomorsk-3, plus a Yak-38U preserved at Zhukovsky and instructional airframes at MAI and KhAI. In Ukraine and Crimea: two Yak-38s at the State Aviation Museum in Kyiv, a Yak-38 and a Yak-38U at the naval museum in the Mikhailovskaya Battery in Sevastopol, a Yak-38M at the Ukrainian Air Force museum, a Yak-38U as a monument at Saky, and several airframes at the Yevpatoria repair works. Counts on that last group are unreliable and some listed aircraft have moved or been scrapped since the surveys were made. The three older ships went too: Kiev, Minsk and Novorossiysk were struck in the early 1990s and sold abroad, two ending as Chinese museum attractions and one for scrap in South Korea, while Baku, renamed Admiral Gorshkov, was sold to India in 2004 and rebuilt as Vikramaditya — the only Kiev-class hull still afloat as a warship, and the only one that never operated a Yak-38 for long.

From the Freehand testbed to fleet retirement

Twelve Yak-38 Forger stories

The Yak-38 Forger in pictures

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The Yak-38 Forger in motion

A curated video feature for the Yak-38 Forger is coming soon. In the meantime, explore the photo gallery above and the operations map below.

Where the Yak-38 Forger operated

The record that defines the Yak-38

The Yak-38 scored no aerial victories and fought no war; its record is one of hard-won experience rather than combat success. Its single operational test under fire — the 1980 Operation Romb deployment to Afghanistan — exposed how badly its VTOL performance collapsed in heat and altitude, and it flew only about a dozen largely inconclusive sorties. At sea it served aboard the four Kiev-class ships until the early 1990s, and in 1982 armed Forgers from Minsk intercepted US carrier aircraft over the Arabian Sea. Set against those thin operational credits is a severe safety record: sources commonly cite that roughly a third of the fleet was lost to accidents.

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of July 2026; contested values are hedged.

Everything people ask about the Yak-38 Forger

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Every fact, checked

• Military Factory — Yakovlev Yak-38 (Forger)Specifications, variant build numbers, armament and the Yak-36 development lineage.
• Naval-Aviation.com — Yakovlev Yak-38 “Forger”The three-engine layout, service dates, Kiev-class deployment and Harrier comparison.
• Military Aviation Videos — The forgotten Soviet VTOL jetsOperation Romb in Afghanistan, the accident rate and lift-engine service life.
• Vintage Aviation News — First untethered flight of the Yak-36Dated milestones for the Yak-36 “Freehand” VTOL precursor.
• UAS Vision — Yakovlev Yak-38Prototype dates, the 1982 Minsk/Enterprise intercept and the automatic ejection system.
• Russia Beyond — Is the Yak-141 the “father” of the F-35B?The Lockheed–Yakovlev cooperation and a hedged view of the F-35B lineage claim.
• The National Interest — The Yak-41 and the F-35BA skeptical counterpoint on how much the Yak-141 really influenced the F-35B.
• RuAviation — Yak-38M carrier-based strike fighterYak-38M engine upgrades and the automatic-ejection trigger logic.