gambit
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This is one of the great mysteries about Soviet aviation. It is a great mystery because the Soviets usually produced great aerodynamicists at all levels, from theoreticians to engineers, the people who put theories into practice.
The radome and its attachments to the fuselage produces all kinds of undesirable aerodynamic flows. What does the E-2 Hawkeye AWACS and the 747 Space Shuttle transporter have in common? Multiple yaw directional stability structures or plenty of rudders in simple language. But the 707 AWACS retains its single rudder. The key is the size of the radome to fuselage ratio, and that the 707 has four jet engines does help. Not only size, but also that the radome rotates and that movement, slow as it is, also produce other aerodynamic flows over the rudder structures.
This points to a suspicion -- that the problem lies NOT in aerodynamics but in platforms. Namely, it is likely that during the Cold War yrs, Soviet aviation had only platforms large enough like the American 707 to handle the radome. Nothing small like E-2 platform that can be modified for naval aviation.
These...
Yakovlev Yak-44 - Wikipedia
Antonov An-71 - Wikipedia
...Are supposed to be for Soviet naval aviation but never came to be because of various technical issues.
Ultimately, AWACS are theater level tactical assets and if deployed on an aircraft carrier, that would disproportionally increases the quantity and quality of combat intelligence for at least 200 miles (or 400 km). It is disproportional because to make up one AWACS, the carrier would have to deploy at least four four-ship fighter sorties over the same time frame that one AWACS can fly, and that is not operationally feasible. It is also disproportional because the AWACS will enable the fleet to range farther because of that greater quantity and quality of intel. The lessons came from WW II where carrier fleets were often limited in their tactics while waiting for intel from their fighter patrols, ie Midway. To put it bluntly, an aircraft carrier fleet without an AWACS will lose a fight. Not odds that it 'may' lose, but WILL lose. Maybe this is why that even though there was a Soviet Navy, the Soviet Union was not a naval power like the US was.
