Mass media in russia report that a rare Il-76PP jamming aircraft is being scrapped on the territory of a former training airfield in the city of Irkutsk. The product of an ambitious Soviet project is now being cut into pieces for a reason almost too prosaic: they needed to free up some space for construction works.
This calls for a closer look into the history of this monster of Soviet design, which theoretically could suppress even American Patriot missile defense systems. In particular, how such supposedly powerful equipment ended up scrapped in an ignominious way.
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It is unknown when exactly Soviet engineers started working on the Il-76PP, there's only general data that it happened sometime "in the mid-1980s". This airborne EW system was manufactured in a single copy, to forever remain at the stage of experimental development and never enter mass production.
The conversion from an ordinary Il-76MD into the Il-76PP was undertaken by the Beriev Aircraft Company in Taganrog, known for its A-50 airborne radar system. According to available records, the Il-76PP's primary role was to suppress the radars of various Western air defense systems, such as the Patriot, with electromagnetic interference.
The most interesting and unusual detail, which seems to have buried the Il-76PP project, is that this aircraft was equipped with an electronic warfare system codenamed Landysh. The same one was also used on the Su-24MP tactical jammer aircraft, only 12 units were manufactured.
Having the Landysh on board means that the Il-76PP required additional power sources. The aircraft designers tried to solve this problem by installing two additional generators based on the AI-24VT aircraft engine. However, this apparently wasn't enough to reliably power the electronic warfare equipment.
But the most problematic thing was that during the development and tests, the Il-76PP designers were unable to achieve electromagnetic compatibility between the aircraft's onboard equipment and the Landysh system which was placed in the pods attached to the wingtips.
In other words, the Il-76PP turned out to be a monstrously large yet non-functional development that was unable to fulfill its main task, so in 1993 this aircraft was put into storage on the territory of the mentioned training airfield in Irkutsk. It seems they only remembered about the Il-76PP when they needed some free space for a construction site. In other words, the stalemate lasted for over three decades until 2024.
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