“We have always shown the Americans there that we can get them”
A large-scale exercise of the ship group of the Russian Navy and naval aviation took place in the central part of the Pacific Ocean. Such naval maneuvers in this region are held for the first time since the collapse of the USSR. MK asked the former commander of Long-Range Aviation (1997-2003), a member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant General Mikhail Oparin, to comment on the flights of our long-range aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.
Photo: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
According to the Ministry of Defense, at one of the stages of the exercise, two Tu-142M3 long-range anti-submarine aircraft flew from the Yelizovo airfield in Kamchatka to the maneuver area in the central Pacific Ocean. The flight lasted more than 14 hours, the planes covered 10 thousand kilometers.
How important are such flights and what tasks are solved during them? These questions were answered by the ex – commander of the Long-Range Aviation, Lieutenant General Mikhail Oparin. According to him, full-range flights are very important, including for demonstrating the capabilities of our aviation. After 1991, during the Yeltsin era, Russia unilaterally refused to fly strategic aircraft on air patrol. At the same time, the Americans have never stopped such flights.
– When I took command in 1997, the first thing we did after a six-year break was to restore flights of strategic aircraft to remote geographical areas, – said Mikhail Oparin. – We started flying first towards the North Pole, to Canada, then – “around the corner”, that is, bypassing Scandinavia to the North Atlantic. In the east-flights over the Pacific Ocean. Wewe have restored all the skills of the crews to perform flights over neutral waters, and they are not so easy to develop, For years the flown crews have been preparing for long-distance flights. And the very organization of such flights, with refueling in the air — is a very difficult task.
According to the general, the Long-Range Aviation Command began patrolling flights even before the decree of President Yeltsin.
– When our “strategists” passed over the Arctic, along Canada, the Americans raised a cry: these are sticking out again! What are they doing there? The most striking thing is that the Russian press then supported the Americans. Such was the time. We in the command went a little crazy. We were then, I remember, both in the tail and mane. But we have restored the skills of the crews. And since 1998, we have started to conduct these long-distance flights regularly. This was task number one.
Later, when I had already quit, they also paid attention to this. My son served in the Long-range Aviation. He and his fellow soldiers mastered these flights across the Pacific Ocean, towards San Francisco. 20 hours duration of the route.
So this area of the Pacific Ocean, where the fleet maneuvers are taking place now — is our native area. We have been holding him at gunpoint since the cold War.
I do not know whether our planes flew to Guam, the main naval base of the United States, during these exercises. But we always “showed them a fig” there, so that they knew that we would get them here too.
In general, long flights are a common job for”dalnikov”.