On 9 March 1987, a strange three-engined fighter rolled out of Yakovlev's Moscow plant: the Yak-41 (NATO: Freestyle). It looked like a stretched Yak-38 Forger crossed with a MiG-29. It had a single Soyuz R-79V-300 vectored-thrust main engine in the tail, plus two Rybinsk RD-41 lift jets behind the cockpit. On 11 September 1991 — three months before the Soviet Union ceased to exist — test pilot Andrei Sinitsyn took it supersonic. It was the first VTOL aircraft in history to break Mach 1 in level flight, and it did so from a vertical takeoff.

The lineage matters. The Yak-38 Forger (1971 first flight, deployed 1976 on the Kiev-class carriers) was the only operational VTOL fighter outside Britain. Subsonic, short-ranged, with a brutal three-engine arrangement that killed pilots when the lift jets failed asymmetrically in the hover. Crews called it "the widowmaker." But the Soviets learned. The Yak-41 fixed everything:

• R-79V-300 vectoring nozzle: a three-bearing swivel duct that rotated 95° downward. This is — almost atom-for-atom — the same architecture Lockheed Martin patented for the F-35B in the late 1990s. Rolls-Royce licensed Yakovlev's nozzle data in 1995 when Lockheed quietly paid Yakovlev for "consultation."
• Mach 1.4 dash speed, combat radius ~700 km — roughly double the Yak-38's, comparable to the F-35B's high-end estimates.
• Composite airframe (26% by weight) and a pulse-Doppler radar adapted from the MiG-29.
• Set 12 world records in its FAI submission as the "Yak-141" — payload-to-altitude marks that stood for decades.

Then, in October 1991, one of the two prototypes crashed onto the deck of the Admiral Gorshkov during sea trials — hard landing, fuel fire, no fatalities. The Soviet Union dissolved two months later. The Russian Navy had no money. The Kiev-class carriers were sold for scrap (one became a Chinese theme park, another a hotel). Funding ended in 1992. Yakovlev, desperate, took Lockheed's money in 1995 in exchange for design data.

Why it deserves a second look in 2026:

• The F-35B costs ~$135 million per airframe and has well-documented availability problems with its single lift fan and clutch. The Yak-41's distributed lift architecture — main vectoring engine plus dedicated lift jets — has no clutch, no driveshaft, and degrades gracefully on a lift-engine failure if you accept a controlled vertical-to-conventional transition.
• Modern FADEC and fly-by-wire would eliminate the asymmetric-thrust hover problem that killed Yak-38 pilots. The 1991 analog FCS was the actual weak point — not the configuration.
• Additive-manufactured turbine blades and ceramic-matrix composite nozzles let you run the swivel duct hotter and lighter than 1987 metallurgy allowed, recovering the thrust margin that limited payload.
• Small navies (Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, Japan, India, Brazil) need a STOVL fighter that isn't $135M and isn't ITAR-locked. A clean-sheet Yak-41 derivative — composites, modern engines, glass cockpit — could land at $60-80M with export freedom.

The drawings exist. The flight envelope was proven. The nozzle works — Lockheed proved that. The only thing missing is somebody willing to build a Cold War Soviet design in a Cold War 2.0 world.