Technically Jurisprudence

Your Unique Portal to Bacolod City!

technological history VM-T Atlant Strategic airlift aircraft


To my fellow illongos and my comrades today lets go back in time and look at some radical technologies in the 70's that we filipinos and illongo otakus have mislooked or was blacked out during the time of the 70's an aircraft worth deserving the awe of filipinos.  meet the Myasishchev VM-T Atlant


The Myasishchev VM-T Atlant (Мясищев ВМ-Т «Атлант») is a variant of Myasishchev's M-4 'Molot' bomber designed as a strategic airlift airplane. The VM-T was modified to carry rocket boosters and the Soviet space shuttles of the Buran program. It is also known as the 3M-T. ls coped with a task of carrying ultra-heavy and oversize freight, such as rocket boosters or the space shuttle, and it might be a real alternative for AN-225. But this project was closed because of some disadvantages. Nevertheless the shots of Atlant in action with the hydrogenous cistern for the rocket booster look quite enchanting. Even more, some people joked that this plane was used for transportation of Pepsi Cola from the USA to Russia during the “perestroika” times.



M4 Molot

The Myasishchev M-4 Molot (Russian: Молот (Hammer), USAF/DoD reporting name "Type 37", NATO reporting name 'Bison'.) is a four-engined strategic bomber designed by Vladimir Myasishchev and manufactured by the Soviet Union in the 1950s to provide a bomber capable of attacking targets in North America. The Myasishchev design bureau was formed to build such a bomber.



The design was conceived in 1978 when Myasishchev was asked to solve the problem of transporting rockets and other large space vehicles to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Engineers used an old 3M (a modified M-4 bomber) and replaced the empennage with dihedral horizontal stabilizers with large rectangular end platetailfins to accommodate any load that was twice the diameter of the aircraft'sfuselage. A large cargo container, placed on top of the aircraft, would contain the freight. In addition, a new control system was added to the plane to compensate for the added weight.


The Atlant first flew in 1981 and made its first flight with cargo in January 1982. Its main task was to ferry Energiya rocket boosters from their development plant to the Baikonur Cosmodrome. On several occasions, the Soviet space shuttle Buran was piggybacked to the Cosmodrome as well.




Looking at the atlant makes me wonder how technology is being made advanced in terms of practicality by the former soviet union, moreover, the Atlant is a good of example of how basics and low technology combined with ingenuity  can even be more made to good use and even become a more useful object.


Two Atlants were built. They were replaced in 1989 by Antonov's An-225 Mriya. Today, One Atlant (RF-01502) is kept at the Zhukovsky airfield in Russia owned by TsAGI and Gromov Flight Research Institute, the other one (RA-01402) at Dyagilevo AFB in Ryazan.


here's a video of the atlant and later the antonov mriya



I will post more of topics like these for you comrades to know more about some technologies we never saw.

No comments:

recently