Ilyushin Bear-D model... naval patrol surveillance aircraft. Jeez, I hope those ground-crew guys have plugs and headsets. The engines on these puppies each have two sets of counter-rotating propellers... one thrashes the air clockwise, the other counterclockwise, both on the same shaft (one with reduction gears to get it spinning the opposite way). The result is a lot of horsepower and a cacophony of noise. This old bird is so loud that when one goes over, acoustic sensors on the SEABED, put there to snoop for submarine activity, can pick up the noise of the aircraft, several thousand feet in the air above water level! Crews almost always have severe hearing difficulty in later life as a result of the full-spectrum roar of the props (the beast has been in service since the mid-Fifties).
Posted on: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 00:03:25 +0000