Have you ever wanted to know more about jets, to touch them and stay inside the cabin? Today we’ll visit a workshop where the mighty airplanes are assembled.
Nose spinners. One of them has a mark of radiation on the right.
Various assembly details.
The tail is not assembled completely.
Planes located in this remote part of the workshop are almost covered with dust.
Old jets undergo the process of modernization.
This is A Cuban MiG-29.
Tail fin.
The first flight of the Cuban MiG-29 occurred in 2007 so we may say that the plane is almost new.
Monument to Lenin. It can be easily mistaken for an employee.
Last stages of assembly.
The jet is almost ready to fly. What country will it belong to?
Indexes of quality and cleanliness of the workshop.
Main works are carried out in this part of the workshop which is very clean.
Chassis.
via saoirse-2010
Yojimbo in the picture with all the wheels with the caption “chassis’ underneath, are those things in front disc brakes of some kind ?
That’s exactly what they are. You can see better here. http://www.b737.org.uk/brakepin.htm
Those are not front gear wheels and tires though in that picture those are the main gear wheels for L-39s in the front and for the MiG-29 in the rear in that photo and the brakes are for the MiG-29 wheels judging from the photo that they are too thick for the L-29 wheels.
your link is a picture of main gear for some western design airliner not a MiG-29.It does show generally what the brake assembly looks like though.
They would seem to be the sort of brakes needed to stop a jet fighter upon landing
Now it’s clear why they crashes so often.
the assymbly line does not look like it has moved in some long time.maybe them have run out of funding and are closed?
I have only seen German Luftwaffe MiG-29′s a few times in the mid 90′s that where visiting my base but;
They appear do be the inner part of the main(rear one on port and starboard)landing gear wheels. They are actually drum brakes disc style brakes would simply get burned up in perhaps one use on any aircraft besides your very small single engine private aircraft like a Yak or a Cenessa.
The Soviets where very big fans of making very rugged landing gear because of their WWII air warfare experience they moved sometimes every few days and the condition of the new air base could be excellent or horrible most times the latter and they lost alot of planes to landing gear failures so after the war they made most combat aircraft have very rugged gear and able to operate in poor conditions as a result they have very tough landing gear.
Also on the MiG-29 and Su-27 when the aircraft is on the ground and taxying the primary air intakes are covered over by an automatic fairing and small slots you can see them in some of these pictures this keeps the engines from ingesting rocks and other FOD that can destroy a jet engine faster than you can say Dimitry Medvedvev.That allows the plane to operate in a forward base with low risk of damage until it can be put into a better military condition.At most air bases you will see guys walking in lines looking at the ground they are looking for FOD that will harm the aircraft also they will check the tire treads of vehicles for the same reason.
Wow you know a stack about Russian planes. Those brakes look incredibly powerfull to me.
Thanks for your reply Jimbo,
You forgot to mention that many Russian aircraft landing gear were fitted with fender skirts. They were to block FOD from being thrown up by the tires.
hello is any one here? whats this switch for I wonder oh oh… leaving now very quietly
So nice. But the actual final stages of assembling the planes, are not shown. Here we can see only empty planes, but in the final stages, all avionics are in place, and I think that in this phase, they don’t like pictures very much…
I don’t think that this facility is fully operational. If photographers are able to get so close to these planes, technically means that none cares, because there is none.
I think it may be a storage area and the main production/refurbishing area is not shown in these pictures.Some of the the parts look like they have been sitting for a while but the floors and such are obviously kept clean.Maybe they use this area for spares and to places planes that in limbo for some reason it seems that they are all foreign aircraft as well.One has an Indian flag and one is Cuban and as far as I know Cuba has a very small ait force perhaps 1 or 2 squadrons of MiG-29 which is about 20 operational aircraft.
@ geoff I said drum when I meant to say disc brake though they are multi disc brakes regular drum and single or double discs as with some motorcycles would just get burned out too fast. I know a lot about western military aircraft as well I find the old Soviet/Russian aviation to be interesting they had some interesting concepts for example the Ekranoplane.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbecl88NsEQ&feature=related
My father was a mechanical engineer, worked on planes at the local air base. He did this for all of his adult life, right up until the demise of the Soviet military. My uncle was, and still is, an instructor at the air base.
Back then, no one without the proper “security clearance” was allowed any where near the planes, mainly because some piece of cutting-edge technology could be sneaked in. The same applied for planes under construction, especially if they were for the air force or air defence force. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
Jimbo The planes in the video are fantastic. I am thinking test pilots are brave. The designers come over and say….see this…. we ‘think’ it will fly…
I guesed about the drum brake thing, thought it was a typo/oversight or else the brakes were disk brakes configured into a drum shape?
It look like mothballed. I wonder what it cost to keep it like that?