Monino Aircraft Museum, Moscow

Monino is one of the largest aviation museums in the world, comparable with Duxford or Wright Patterson and is unquestionably the largest collection of Russian aircraft on the planet. It has a very comprehensive collection of Cold War aircraft and a pretty decent collection of WW2 panes.

 This immaculate Polikarpov I-15bis was very well presented.

 The Colonel who was our guide kindly allowed me to step behind the barriers and thus I was able to take a number of shots not possible on my first visit. This is the tail of a Lavochkin-5 fighter.

 The Petlyakov Pe-2 light bomber and dive bomber was an excellent multi-role bomber, slower than a Mosquito but faster than a Ju-88, so fast indeed that British Hurricane pilots had difficulyy keeping up when assigned to escort. Russians had two speeds - flat out and stopped.They drive like that too, most of them.

 This Ilyushin Il-2m3 Sturmovik is very well presented too and the display includes some of the deadly RS82 rocket bombs the Russians used for anti-tank work.

 The Tupolev Tu-4 bomber was a copy of the B028, although with better, larger guns (23mm) and different engines. Like the Americans, the Russians had difficulty in cooling the rear row of the four row radials.

 The Tu-16 built on B-29 technology and added two large turbojets and swept wings to make an aircraft so successful that it is still in service.

 The Tu-22 medium bomber was detested by its crews and suffered a 20 per cent attrition.

 Another, more attractive Tu-16. They were used for long-range strike and maritime reconnaissance and strike with large air-to-surface missiles like this one.

 The Tu-2 was built to replace the Pe-2 but didn't reach the troops in substantial numbers until 1944. It was a very fine aircraft, equivalent to an A-26 Invader.

 The DB-3 was the ancestor of the Ilyushin Il-4 medium bomber. This was one of those which bomber Berlin in August 1941.

 The museum's pet dog looked like a dingo!

 This big supersonic bomber proved too expensive to mass produce.

 The civilian version of the Tu-95 was the Tu-114 airliner, which could fly from Moscow to Havvana, Cuba, the longest scheduled service at the time.

This big Sukhoi (Su-33?) was close to the gate, completing a long line of Frontal Aviation and Air Defence fighters...

 such as this Su-20 fighter bomber.

 Testing the telephoto lens of my camera I was fully 400 metres from Paul when I snapped him in from of one of the Tu-95s.

This was about the only angle I could get on the Tu-26 Backfire which was a pity.