In the 1960s, the cold war was reaching new heights everyday. Their was this arms race between the two poles which seemingly had no end. Only 20 yrs after WWII, the strategic bomber was still the first thing that came into the military brass's minds. While the Soviets were pushing for spy satellites and ICBMs, USA still believed that a long range high speed bomber was needed to deliver atomic/nuclear bombs. Hence came about the short lived XB-70 Valkyrie. This baby gave USSR the creeps. In their usual style they tried to copy and came up with the Su-T4 which existed for shorter time still.

The T-4, also called S100 (indicating that it was a prototype) first flew in 1972 and easily achieved Mach 1.28 at 12,000m. The aircraft completed a number of successful flight tests and showed a real promise of reaching its design requirements. The T-4 featured world's most advanced electrohydraulic, quadruple redundancy fly-by-wire system. When the nose of the aircraft was up and locked, the pilots had no forward visibility and all flying was on instruments.

Confidence in instruments is indeed noteworthy, and can also be seen in Buran, the Russian Space Shuttle. Buran made its first and only flight unmanned(!). Considering the effort NASA puts into its own Shuttle Commanders, this is quite an achievement.

The similarities between the two are cleanly visible. Though the T-4 was initially intended as an answer to the Valkyrie, it ended up only as a mid-range, mid-size bomber. USSR often copied many designs from the west. These include Tu-160 Blackjack and Tu-144 Charger SuperSonic aircraft.

The T-4 project was cancelled due to unknown reasons. However, one obvious cause is the cancellation of XB-70 itself. Another fact remains that an expensive bomber like T-4 could not be justified(just like XB-70). However, other alternatives were reached apon by Russia - the MiG-25 Foxbat and MiG-31 Foxhound high speed interceptors. Their performance are still unchallenged. The MiG-31 was equipped to the Amos Air-to-Air Missile (AAM). Also, Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) posed another challenge.

There exists a brand new russian Supersonic bomber project that has not been revealed to the public. This is the Sukhoi Su-T60 Joint Inter-Continental Bomber. Bombers have been exclusively reserved for the Tuplev design bureau, and T-4 was one of the exceptions. While T-60 does exist, to what it has been completed is unknown. The development was halted completely after the USSR broke up. It is natural to expect that the Sukhoi OKB will take some inputs from its earlier bomber.

Also See :

Aircraft	:	XB-70 Valkyrie
Aircraft	:	Concorde
Aircraft	:	Tu-244

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