On 6 April 1966 a Yak-28P suffered engine failure over the divided city of Berlin. Rather than eject immediately over the built-up British Sector, the two-man crew — pilot Captain Boris Kapustin and navigator Lieutenant Yuri Yanov — are widely reported to have stayed with the failing aircraft and steered it away from apartment blocks, before it came down in Lake Stössensee, part of the Havel lakes. Both men were killed and later received a posthumous Order of the Red Banner; their sacrifice became a well-known story in the Soviet Union.

Because the wreck lay in the British Sector, it also became one of the best-documented Western technical-intelligence recoveries of the Cold War. British forces, with US help, cordoned the lake while specialists examined the interceptor’s radar and engines — and, by several accounts, quietly flew parts to Britain for study before returning the aircraft to the Soviets. The exact details are told differently by different sources, but the episode is remembered on both sides as the “Firebar affair.”

NATO sorted the Yak-28 into three reporting-name families by role. “Brewer” covered the tactical-bomber, reconnaissance and electronic-warfare jets — the base Yak-28 and Yak-28B/L/I bombers (Brewer-A/B/C), the Yak-28R reconnaissance aircraft (Brewer-D) and the Yak-28PP jammer (Brewer-E). “Firebar” was reserved for the radar-nosed Yak-28P interceptor, of which several hundred were built. “Maestro” was the two-seat Yak-28U conversion trainer. Exact production splits vary between sources, so treat sub-variant totals as approximate.

The Yak-28P was Soviet air defence’s answer to gaps in its interceptor coverage. It carried a two-man crew, a nose radar, and typically a pair of R-8 / K-8 family missiles (R-98/R-98M, NATO AA-3 “Anab”) — commonly one infrared-homing and one semi-active radar-homing round — sometimes supplemented by short-range missiles. Unlike many contemporaries it carried no internal gun. Popular sources muddle the exact missile designations, so the loadout below should be read as representative rather than definitive.

The Yak-28 was a Soviet state product, built for the Soviet armed forces and never sold on an open dollar market. As a result there is no credible flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour figure for the type in the public record — unlike Western aircraft of the era, its true programme economics were never published in convertible currency. Any precise dollar cost you see attached to a Yak-28 is, in practice, a modern estimate rather than a sourced figure.