Commander Dixit was sweating even with air conditioning turned to maximum . He has pushed the collective power lever to maximum right up to take off power limits and the groan of the four massive turbo props made everyone on board wince .He could see the engine temperature slowly going up the lubricating oil pressure falling and the engine exhaust way over normal . At this low altitude the wings were buckling uncontrollably and surely this was way out of designed operating envelope of engineers at Tupolev aeronautical design bureu.
The indicated air speed was actually 843 km per hour and he was lucky to have strong tail wind so the actual ground speed was close to 900 kmph almost the same speed as the normal cruise speed of a Su 30 mki or Mig 29 K . He did not know how long he would be able to maintain this manic suicidal dash at low altitude when the radar warning receiver bleeps once and then kept on bleeping every 5 seconds conforming he is now being painted by a hostile radar .
He nodded to his flight engineer who immediately switched on the ECM pod ,hoping against all hope the Russians have pre fed the search and track frequency of the MKK s radar in to the data base
The Kuznetsov NK-12 is a Soviet turboprop engine of the 1950s, designed by the Kuznetsov design bureau. It drives huge eight-bladed (four per propeller) contra-rotating propellers 5.6 m in diameter (6.2 m in the NK-12MA) and weighing 1,155kg (NK-12MV).
The NK 12 turboprop was originally developed after World War II by a German ex-Junkers team under Ferdinand Brandner, evolving from late war German turboprop studies . This started with the post-war development of the wartime Jumo 012 turboprop design that developed 6000 ehp in a 3000 kg engine. The effort continued with a 5000 ehp engine that weighed in at 1700 kg, completed by 1947. The evolution to the TV-12 12000 Ehp engine required extensive use of new Soviet-developed alloys and was completed in 1951.
The NK-12M developed 8,948 kW (12,000 ehp) uprated in the NK-12MV to 11,033 kW (14,795 ehp) and reaching 11,185 kW (15,000 ehp) in the NK-12MA. NK-12 is by a wide margin the most powerful turboprop engine ever built, only recently the Progress D-27 and Europrop TP400 come somewhat close. It powered the Tupolev Tu-95 / Tu-142 bomber, the Tupolev Tu-114 airliner NK-12MV (still the world's fastest propeller-driven aircraft), and the Antonov An-22 Antheus NK-12MA — the world's largest aircraft at the time. It has also been used to power several types of amphibious assault craft, such as the A-90 Orlyonok "Ekranoplan".
The contra-rotating propellers are driven by a 14-stage axial-flow compressor producing compression ratios between 9:1 to 13:1 according to altitude, controlled also by variable inlet guide vanes and blow-off valves. The combustion system used is a cannular-type: each flame tube is centrally mounted on a down-stream injector that ends in an annular secondary region. The single turbine is a five-stage axial. Mass flow is 65 kg (143 lb) /sec.