"Tupolev Tu-4 "Bull"." Topic

Nice big plane, which company made it in 1/72?

Thanks in advance for your guidance.

Amicalement
Armand

I saw a program on the Discovery Ch about this aircraft. It was a reverse-engineered copy of the US B-29 Superfortress. So exact, that they copied the "Boeing" on the foot pedels.

This ?
link

Yea, any B-29 model will do.

Just change the decals, or not, as was suggested in one movie, where a Russian B-29 was going to bomb China (IIRC – could have been a Chinese, or NK B-29 doing the reverse, as well, I guess), in order to start WWIII.

Might as well let them wipe each other off the map, instead of getting involved directly.

Of course, there was the "little issue" of radioactive fallout, and nuclear Winter that wasn't addressed, but, it was a movie plot, so you have to cede a little reality for those sometimes…….

They even copied the flaw in the early engines that made it prone to catching fire on start up. They were copied from B29s that were interred after landing in Siberia after being damaged or lost after raids on Japan. Some were sold to the PRC where they were escorted by P51s that we had given to the Nationalist Chinese. To turn a B29 kit into a Tu4 should be easy, I think that there was some modification to the turrets to use Soviet machine guns.

My dad and I saw one over here (Wales) in the mid-1990s. It was an amazing sight, as it was beetling along at only about 1,500 feet. We thought we were seeing things until a year or so later, when I spoke to an RAF Gp Capt who had been on board – it was from one of the former Warpac nations, exercising their rights of overflight under the Open Skies treaty (which gave the signatories the right to overfly military installations, in order to check that treaty-limited weaponry wasn't being squirrelled away).

Interesting, thanks!

My dad and I saw one over here (Wales) in the mid-1990s.

Do you have any more info on that? I'd love to cover that in my history class as an example of how the world changed so quickly after the Cold War, but I'd need some documentation.

Thanks for the info gameorpaint!

Amicalement
Armand

I built a 1/72 B29 once. Big plane is right!

Interesting report about the overflight in Wales. I am sure it was quite a sight to see.

Out here in West Texas of course we periodically get to see FiFi, the CAF's B29.

No documentation, but the Open Skies Liaision Cell operated out of RAF Henlow. It was the OC of the liaison cell that I spoke to (in 1998) – he wangled the trip because he was originally from Milford Haven and that was one of the places to be overflown. I can't now remember the nationality, but it was definitely Eastern European Warpac, not Russian.

Doh! Of course, it might also have belonged to a former Soviet republic such as Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, etc (neither Russia or Warpac).

There is a Wiki page on the Open Skies Treaty here: link

Our 'guide' at Monino spluttered with indignation when we called the Tu-4 a B-29. He said it was not copied but an original Soviet design! This was in the 90's, when the museum was off limits to most visitors, so maybe he was a Communist re-tread unused to Westerners. The aircraft itself, like most in the outside display, was in a bad way, but it was a fascinating machine.

I saw one on the ground at the Moscow airport in 1960 – I suspect it was the TU-4D transport version, since I don't think I saw any turrets. It being June, when night in Moscow lasts from 3:00 to 3:30 am, the wily Sovs had timed our landing for nightfall and turned out all the lights except in the terminal, probably so we wouldn't see anything while we walked across the runway after deplaning. They needn't have bothered; most of our group were so sick after flying from Vienna to Moscow in a TU-104 (the "airliner" version of the TU-16) that we wouldn't have noticed flying saucers being refueled.

LT