On this day in 1976, the tower at Hakodate had a Sunday's worth of domestic flights to look after and then, without so much as a filed flight plan, a Soviet MiG-25 interceptor came in over Hokkaido and put itself on the runway. Viktor Belenko landed long, ran off the end of the tarmac and stopped short of the far fence, with fuel left in his tanks measured not in gallons but in a handful of minutes. Nobody was hurt. He climbed down and asked to go to the West.
I think about the ground staff. A civil airport keeps a stand for every arrival it expects, and this was an arrival nobody had timetabled: no gate, no handling agent, no marshaller trained for a Foxbat. They improvised, they kept the public back, they got the rest of the day's aeroplanes moving again. That is the unglamorous half of aviation and it is nearly always the half that works.
The aircraft itself was looked over closely — the Director of Central Intelligence of the day, George H. W. Bush, called it an intelligence bonanza — and then taken apart and shipped home in crates, which is a very orderly ending for something that arrived so suddenly. Belenko went on to work as an aerospace engineer in the United States.
Harold, the fuel arithmetic is the part that gets me: he flew low over the sea to stay under radar, and low air is thick air, so the tanks emptied far faster than a high cruise would have cost him. Any navigator will tell you the route you must fly and the route you can afford are rarely the same one.
Harold, here's the clever bit for those of us who kept a drawer of tubes: when the engineers opened the Foxbat's radar they found vacuum tubes, not transistors. Not backwardness at all — tubes shrug off electrical pulses and put out enormous power, and the Soviet designers knew exactly what they were choosing.