The Pentagon used to worry that North Korea could use them to sneak attack South Korea (apparently NK has a very large number of them):
Before his Guatemalan adventure, J.D. snagged a U.S. Navy contract to fly one of his airplanes as a radar target. In this test, the airplane demonstrated another of its celebrated characteristics: its ability to fly unbelievably slow before stalling. “We lumbered along at 60 knots [about 70 mph], maintaining altitude so the Navy could capture the radar signature,” he says. The test, run out of Naval Air Station Point Mugu in California, was meant to support the sale of F-15s to South Korea by proving that the radar—built by Lockheed Martin and used at the time on the Navy’s F-14 Tomcats—could track slow Antonovs, which the North Koreans flew in the 1990s to transport commando paratroopers. “We flew 30 or 40 miles out to sea in the Pacific Missile Test Range to rendezvous with an F-14,” says Webster. “The F-14 got back to base in about 10 minutes. It took us 45.”
The controllers at the base tower were accustomed to jets; “they couldn’t figure out what we were,” Webster says. “When they started tracking us, I got a call saying ‘What are you? Are you a helicopter?’ ”
“It will fly a lot slower than that,” says John Webster. Along for a ride in Guatemala in 1997, when Kharitonov demonstrated the airplane’s stall behavior for the pilots in the start-up air service, Webster was astonished when Kharitonov flew at such a slow speed—around 35 mph—that the airspeed indicator stopped working. He was demonstrating a landing in what Webster calls “the parachute mode,” which entails stalling the aircraft down low and having it drop onto the field. “You might bend the airplane,” says Webster, “but you’d walk away.” The Antonov’s operator’s handbook doesn’t bother to list a stall speed. Pilots could control it at such slow speeds that Soviet paratroopers would practice low-level jumps into snowdrifts without parachutes.
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