First Soviet Jets

 

The history of our jet aviation dates back 70 years ago, to 15 May 1942. It all started at the very same place where youТve picked up this magazine Ц in Koltsovo airport.

 

СBiТ jet was an outstanding engineering achievement, no more, no less. This is a story of people who fought for their dream to come true when many of their fellow countrymen were trying to survive. However, great deeds are often necessitated or triggered by somebodyТs mistakes or even meanness. This was exactly the case with the story of the Soviet jet plane.


No sense of perspective

 

Only thirty years had passed since the first flights of the Wright brothers, when it became clear that aviation advancement was grinding to a halt. The piston engine and aerodynamic propeller had exhausted their capacity and the 750 km/h was their absolute top speed limit.

 

This was when the world remembered rocket scientists, who had been previously thought of as weird with their dreams of space flights. At that time enthusiasts were experimenting with liquid-fuel engines that could work in outer space. In the early 1930s English and German scientists patented jet-propulsion engines. As a result, the first trials of German jet planes took place in 1939-40, and an English Gloucester jet aircraft took off in May 1940.

 

What about the USSR? The country was desperately forging ahead, selling Hermitage treasures and bread taken from starving children in exchange for foreign machinery. Factory workers with their unrivalled enthusiasm worked all day and then travelled across the entire city to listen to lectures until midnight to get engineering qualifications as soon as possible.

 

Miracles do happen, but not on a regular basis. The gap between the USSR and more developed industrial countries was unbridgeable. All this effort on the part of the Soviet workers and scientists was just about enough to catch up with traditional piston engine aviation. There werenТt any resources left to go any further.

 

There were rocket scientists, but in 1938 The Jet Technology Research Institute (NII) was effectively destroyed after mass-scale arrests of its employees. Evidence suggests that repressions were guided by denunciations of an InstituteТs employee who wanted to remain the best and brightest, but this inevitably led to the most talented and hard-working people being ousted. All the research activities slowed down. At that time there was only one engineer in the USSR working on jet-propulsion engines, a young engineer Arkhip Lyulka from Kharkov. However, in the absence of decent equipment any technical hitch became insoluble, it was in many ways like tightening a screw without a screwdriver.


The disillusioned

 

Soviet aviation fed on the anticipation of a great war in which, it became clear, the common propeller airplane was to be used. There was, however a СgangТ of engineers who were thinking outside the box: the design bureau headed by Viktor Bolkhovitinov was established on the base of the newly built aircraft factory in Khimki, a suburb in the north-west of Moscow. He was convinced that to make an aircraft of the future, new and wildly imaginative ideas were needed. He welcomed graduates, which was common at that time, but he actually gave them free rein. Today we would have said that he encouraged start-ups.

 

In the end of 1940 he was joined by his recent student Sasha Bereznyak, who had been to the tests at NII-1 facility and saw a liquid-fuel jet engine with 1 tonne propulsion power. It wasnТt ready yet and exploded on every other test, but the engineers in charge of the project promised to finish it in a couple of months. Another drawback was that the engine consumed a tremendous amount of fuel and an aircraft could only hold enough fuel for three minutes, but it was still a tonne of propulsion power! It was unheard of. This couldТve been an interceptor that would target a range of bombers and then land as a glider. Bolkhovitinov gave his team the go-ahead.


Bereznyak and Vladimir Isaev (on photo), who also joined the team, started working on the new project. Isaev was slightly older than Bereznyak, though they were both in their thirties, but he was deemed more experienced and serious, which, in fact, wasnТt exactly the case. Isaev was a mining engineer and several years before that he sent his application to the aircraft factory. His motivation was that he lived and breathed aviation, but he thought it wasnТt Сrocket scienceТ and he was sure he would learn everything that he needed in a year. He got the job. At that time, Bolkhovitinov, whom they called СpatronТ had just turned 40.


By June 1941 the aircraft design was ready. The only thing lacking was the engine, which was still a work in progress, and its fuel pumps were far from being ready. On 21 June Bereznyak and Isaev decided to drop them altogether and use compressed gas as the fuel supply. However, to implement, gas tanks had to be installed on the aircraft, which meant a complete revamp of the project.

 

The next day the war was declared. Isaev found Bolkhovitinov at his country house and convinced him to go to Narkom (PeopleТs Commissar - the Soviet equivalent of a minister) of Aviation Industry to make the interceptor project top priority. Narkom gave them a week to finish the draft. Bolkhovitinov agreed to that, since they had been working on the project for over half a year already. When they left the NarkomТs office, Isaev explained that the day before that they had decided to start from scratch.

 

However, they did manage to complete it in 12 days and promised the Kremlin to produce a working aircraft in three months. The Kremlin replied back that they only had one month. To buy themselves some time, they didnТt produce any drawings and worked straightaway with wood and veneer. They were motivated not only by the order given by the very top people of the country, but also by the sirens that sounded every night when Moscow was bombed. They needed an interceptor here and now. By autumn almost everything was ready. The aircraft was towed across the airfield by a truck, and, as you might guess, the only component still missing was the engine.


16 October 1941 was a day of disgrace and heroism for Moscow. The German troops and tanks were near Yakhroma, a village about 20 minutes away from the city. People started to panic and were storming the Moscow railway stations, while Gorky motorway was jammed with cars saving officials, their families and furniture. At the same time, at the plant No 293, which was closer to the enemy than the rest of the city, workers were carefully loading an incomplete rocket airplane into a troop train.


In the depth to the Ural minesЕ


On 7 November the troop train stopped at a platform amidst dense forest in Bilimbay, a factory settlement 60 km to the west of
Sverdlovsk. There was an abandoned factory built during the reign of Catherine the Great, and there was a lot of work to do to adapt it for rocket engineers. Factory workers with their families were housed in the nearby church with a stone floor (and it was 20C below zero outside). In December and January the temperature dropped to -40C and only in February was it possible to resume the work. Isaev worked on the engine on his own, as it was clear that NII-1 was not going to contribute much.


He was desperately looking for at least some literature on the topic in the library of the State Polytechnic Institute, but then he managed to arrange a meeting with the countryТs biggest expert, Valentin Glushko, who was working in a
Kazan prison together with Korolev. In the short conversation that they had Isaev learned a lot, but the work was still going very slowly. He was relying on trial and error, where СerrorТ usually meant explosion, and he had to start work all over again. Working with oxidants and nitric acid was an altogether different story, and these ingredients dissolved joints and seals, vaporized and destroyed everything, including workersТ lungs. There was no point in leafing through the catalogues of materials and spare parts: even if there was something in the country, it wasnТt immediately clear where this or that plant was. Cutting-edge technologies were essentially homemade, and used what had been brought from Khimki or scavenged from nearby factories or evacuated people.

 

They built a stand on a bridge across Chusovaya river: engine with the nozzle facing the river, fuel tanks and a pilot seat with controls. On 20 February 1942, which was his birthday, test pilot Grigory Bakhchivandzhi sat in the seat, joined by motor engineer Arvid Pallo from NII-1. The test pilot would have to switch on the engine and switch it off after a certain period of time. However, it didnТt go to plan: there was an explosion, combustion chamber flew off the fixtures, pierced nitric acid tanks and the acid lashed onto Grigory and Arvid. Bakhchivandzhi had a concussion, and his СluckyТ leather coat saved him from burns. Glasses protected PalloТs eyes, but his face was scarred for the rest of his life.


However, everything was ready by April and the aircraft was transported to Koltsovo airfield. The only thing they still couldnТt fix was the acid: the moment they fixed a leak, the nasty smell was there again. By 12 May, after a number of careful taxings and 1-2 meter СjumpsТ Bi-1 was ready for the first real flight. Unfortunately, it was raining heavily on the 13th, as well as 14th and 15th of May. The area around the airfield was absolutely silent, for the first time after several weeks: for the sake of the test flights they cancelled all the flights, including those transporting the new machinery to the frontline. Hundreds of people gathered on trees to get a glimpse of the test flight of the new aircraft.


The first in the
USSR

 

Bakhchivandzhi couldnТt wait any longer and after lunch left for weather reconnaissance. He returned with good news Ц the rain was about to stop. As dusk started to fall he ordered, СClear tailТ, which originated in Koltsovo by analogy with the traditional СClear propТ. With deafening noise and a great deal of flame the aircraft shoot into air, and with the engine working for just one minute, it reached the height of 1 kilometer. The landing was not altogether perfect: Bakhchivandzhi touched the ground and one landing wheel broke down. Nevertheless, it was a triumph!

 

The aircraft was written off due to the damage done by the acid. It took them more than six months to build a new one, and the flights resumed in January 1943. The decision was made to start producing a limited range of this aircraft provided that all the defects were rectified. After that, flights with full operating weight started and the planes were gaining speed with every flight. In the seventh flight, on 27 March, the pilots were hoping to beat the world record. The engine worked, as planned, for 80 seconds, but then the aircraft nosedived at 800 km/h and crashed into Patrushikhinsky pond near Uktus, a village to the south of Sverdlovsk. Most likely, the reason behind the crash was an aerodynamic phenomenon which also got in the way of the German jet plane engineers. All of these planes had a straight wing, whose front edge was perpendicular to the approaching flow. However, after reaching a certain critical speed of about 800 km/h the flow changed and an imaginary center of ascentional force moved backwards. As a result, it nosedived and elevators could not compensate for it.

BolkhovitinovТs design bureau continued working on Bi plane on their return to Moscow. This was still very topical: although there wasnТt much of a risk of air raids, Soviet aviation was up against German Messers. However, short flight time and nitric acid made BiТs usability questionable. Then came the realization that Me-262 planes, which were faster but relatively rare, did not make much of a difference. In 1945 Bi project was over and all bets were now on jet-propulsion engines. Bolkhovitinov was thinking of this back in 1941. When he found out that Lyulka with his small team of engineers was working on Kirovsky plant in Leningrad, he insisted that they should be evacuated to Bilimbay. It might have saved Lyulka from death in besieged Leningrad, although at that point in time his engines were even further from reality than the fuel engine. Later he moved to Chelyabinsk, where he worked on tank engines. He resumed his work on jet-propulsion engines after the victory and based on the captured engines in 1948 he created the first Soviet working jet engine.

 

The first step is always the hardest


Today we may smile condescendingly at those people who spent years and years of their lives to make a veneer airplane weighing 1.5 tonnes (this is an average weight of a modern car!) take off and fly for 2-3 minutes. They could not say, unlike many of their colleagues, that their planes were fighting the Germans, but big changes start with small steps. Airplanes with liquid oxidizer engines turned out to be a dead end, but somebody had to try it, fail and chalk it up to experience. A small Ural village turned out to be the cradle of the Soviet rocket and space science.

 

Vladimir Isaev spent all his life working on rocket engines Ц they are now being used in air defense and ballistic missile defense, as well as Soyuz space ships. Alexander Bereznyak established and headed a team working on winged missiles. СSemerkaТ, the first intercontinental rocket, which was a prototype for Vostok and Soyuz space ships that are still in use, strangely embarked on its first flight on 15 May 1957, exactly 15 years later after the first flight of the Bi plane. The best engineers from KorolevТs design bureau were Сthe BilimbaysТ, including Vasily Mischin, who was to follow in Sergey KorolevТs footsteps. Arvid Pallo, for instance, founded the search and rescue service for the landing capsules.


One of KorolevТs closest companions was Boris Evseevich Chertok, who contributed a lot to thisarticle. He lived an amazingly long life, beyond 100 years, and was still teaching at the
Moscow State Technical University named after Bauman. He wanted to visit the upcoming anniversary in Koltsovo, but sadly he passed away several months ago.

 



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