Moderatore: Staff md80.it
.Obituary
Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau Chief Dies .....
Aviation Week & Space Technology Mar 10, 2014 , p. 13
Rostislav Belyakov, who headed the Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau from 1969 to 1997, died of an unspecified illness in Moscow on Feb. 28.
He was 94.
Belyakov joined the bureau in 1941, two years after its establishment, and became its deputy chief designer in 1957.
He was appointed general designer after the bureau's founder, Artyom Mikoyan, suffered a stroke in 1969.
Belyakov played an important role in the development of the MiG-25 Mach 2.8 interceptor and reconnaissance/strike aircraft, with its unique welded-steel airframe.
Under his leadership, the bureau produced the MiG-29, with its ground-breaking agility and high-off-boresight air-to-air weapons; and the MiG-31, the world's first combat aircraft with an electronically scanned radar.
As the Cold War thawed in the late 1980s, Belyakov's team organized the first appearance of a Soviet fighter at an international air show—the MiG-29 at Farnborough in 1988—and led the first Russian military aviation delegation to visit the U.S., at the University of Michigan in 1989.
In 1991, together with French journalist Jacques Marmain, Belyakov wrote MiG – Fifty Years of Secret Aircraft Design, a classic of aviation history.
.