Ilyushin Il-28 Beagle
The Ilyushin Il-28, NATO reporting name Beagle, is a Soviet twin-engined jet bomber that first flew in 1948 and entered service in 1950. Soviet factories built 6,316 of them between 1949 and 1955; Avia licence-built the type in Czechoslovakia as the B-228, and Harbin built it in China without a licence as the H-5. Exported widely, it was deployed to Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, and North Korea is reported to remain its last operator.
Why It Mattered
The Il-28 was the Soviet Union's first jet bomber to enter large-scale production. It came from a requirement to replace the piston-engined Tupolev Tu-2, and in the early Cold War it became the standard tactical bomber of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. NATO knew it by the reporting name Beagle. The Aviationist calls it one of the most prolific, reliable and adaptable bombers fielded by the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and their client states. Production spread beyond the Soviet Union, under licence in Czechoslovakia and, without a licence, in China.
Design Notes
Design work began in 1947, around two turbojets developed from the British Rolls-Royce Nene: the RD-45 and its improved successor, the Klimov VK-1. The layout mixed old and new: a high, unswept wing and swept tail surfaces, with the engines in bulky nacelles slung directly beneath the wings. Three crew — pilot, navigator-bombardier and gunner — sat in separate pressurised compartments, the navigator in the glazed nose and the gunner isolated in the tail. Defensive armament was a powered tail turret with two 23 mm cannon, backed by two fixed nose cannon fired by the pilot, and the internal bomb bay could carry single bombs of up to 3,000 kg. To speed manufacture, the fuselage was split vertically along its centreline, so the halves could be built and fitted out separately before being bolted together. The basic bomber was adapted into many variants, among them the Il-28R photo-reconnaissance aircraft, the Il-28T naval torpedo bomber and the Il-28U trainer, which NATO called Mascot.
Operational History
The first prototype, powered by imported Nene engines, flew for the first time on 8 July 1948, piloted by Vladimir Kokkinaki. After state tests, it was ordered into large-scale production on 14 May 1949, now with VK-1 engines, and service deliveries began in early 1950. Twenty-five aircraft flew over Moscow's May Day parade in 1950. Soviet production ran from 1949 to 1955 and totalled 6,316 aircraft. In Czechoslovakia, Avia licence-built the bomber and the trainer as the B-228 and CB-228, and the Czechoslovak Air Force operated the type from 1955 to 1973. China received more than 250 Soviet-built aircraft from 1952, and after the Sino-Soviet split Harbin put the type into production without a licence as the H-5; the first production H-5 flew in April 1967. Chinese production is counted separately: over 319 H-5 bombers, plus 187 HJ-5 trainers. The type's most tense deployment came in 1962, when 42 crated Il-28s were unloaded in Cuba; a U-2 photographed the fuselages at San Julián airfield on 15 October, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis settlement the aircraft were re-crated and shipped back. Egyptian Il-28s bombed Israeli airfields during the 1956 Suez crisis, and twenty-four of Egypt's original thirty-nine aircraft are thought to have been destroyed. The Soviet Union itself flew the type in Afghanistan after its 1979 invasion, where it proved effective in low-level bombing. By then its frontline days at home were long past: relegated to second-line duties in the late 1950s, some Soviet variants lingered in service into the 1980s.
Afterlife
Chinese-built H-5s were still flying in the 1990s, several hundred of them in China itself. Retired bombers found second careers in target towing, reconnaissance and atmospheric research, and Aeroflot used the type — its first jet — to carry newspaper matrices and other cargo to Siberia. Individual aircraft survive on display, among them an Il-28 at the air force museum at Berlin-Gatow and the aircraft a Chinese crew defected in to Taiwan in 1965, now on display there. The type may not be finished yet: writing in October 2024, The Aviationist reported that it is thought to possibly still be flying in North Korea, and Wikipedia's account names the Korean People's Army Air Force as the sole remaining operator, putting its fleet at approximately 80 aircraft of believed mixed Soviet and Chinese origin.