Usually, when we hear about civilian aircraft, we imagine huge airbuses that can fly along thousands of kilometers of routes. However, more than forty percent of air travel is carried out by local airlines, the length of which is 200-500 kilometers, and sometimes they are measured in only tens of kilometers. It was for such purposes that the Yak-40 aircraft was created. This unique aircraft will be discussed in the article.
Many times the first
The Yak-40 (the photo in the article shows this aircraft) became the first passenger jet aircraft in the Soviet Union and in the world , which was designed for operation on local airlines. He became the first aircraft of the USSR, which received a certificate of airworthiness in Western countries before the appearance of similar certification in our country. The Yak-40 was the first of domestic airbuses to receive certificates in Germany and Italy. He was also the first Soviet aircraft to pass all the airworthiness standards of England BCAR and USA - FAR-25. Certification work on this aircraft contributed to the acceleration of the organization of the aviation registry in the USSR, the adoption of airworthiness standards, as well as the development by our industry of a number of units and materials that meet Western standards. In addition, he became the first passenger airliner for the Yakovlev Design Bureau.
First customer and expert reviews
Italy became the first country in the world to acquire a Yak-40 aircraft. She also organized the presentation of the high performance characteristics of this machine. Piloted by test pilot M. G. Zavyalov and Italian pilots, the plane flew from the capital of Italy to Australia. This route was overcome without any failures or breakdowns. In April 1970, the French Aviation Magazine noted that the Yak-40 is original in design, size and flight characteristics. In the West, there is practically no aircraft that could be opposed to a Russian novice. In the United States, similar projects were only being developed, the implementation of which was to take place only a few years later.
All world experts gave the highest rating to the Russian aircraft and Yakovlev Design Bureau.
Aircraft creation
Engineers began developing the Yak-40 in April 65 of the last century. The purpose of the new aircraft was to replace the obsolete piston models IL-12, IL-14 and Li-2, working on local airlines. Soviet aircraft manufacturers needed only one year to design and build a prototype. And so, on October 21, 1966, the test pilot Arseniy Kolosov was the first to fly a prototype - the Yak-40. A feature of the aircraft was the ability to take off from unpaved airfields. This was facilitated by the excess safety factor of the aircraft structure laid in it by the engineers of the Yakovlev Design Bureau.
"Kerosene Fighter", or "Iron Cigarette"
The Yak-40 (photo above) is the most simple machine designed for flight and ground personnel with average skills. Two nicknames were attached to it - “Iron Cigarette” (for relatively small sizes and heavy smoke of power units) and “Kerosene Fighter” (for high fuel consumption). This airbus is characterized by very high reliability, as well as safety in operation. The Yak-40 is able to take off if one of the three engines fails and fly on one of the power units. At unprepared airfields, the work of maintenance personnel is facilitated by an autonomous starting device, a folding ladder, and high controllability of the machine. The placement of engines in the rear of the fuselage significantly reduced the level of vibration and noise.
Labor achievements
In total, the Soviet aircraft industry produced 1011 units of the Yak-40 model. Release was stopped in 1981, but the life of the aircraft did not end there. More than forty years on world airways - is this not the best confirmation of the reliability of the machine, the correctness of technical solutions to complex problems that arose when creating this model! And the designers and technologists of the Minsk Aircraft Repair Plant not only provided a second life for the aircraft, but together with the specialists of the Yakovlev Design Bureau created new modifications - flying laboratories, which have recently gained great importance in the national economy. In Russia, the aircraft has found very wide application. So, by the mid-seventies, the Yak-40 completely supplanted the veterans of Il-12, Il-14 and Li-2 from local airlines. Having mastered flights to more than three hundred settlements of the country, these hard workers by 1988 transported more than eighty million passengers. And the story of this plane is still not finished. The operating experience of this model in our and in eighteen foreign countries absolutely accurately showed the fallacy of the decision to remove the Yak-40 aircraft from production. So, replacing power units with more economical modern engines would increase the production and export of this aircraft.
Export
Supply of the first Yak-40 aircraft for export was launched in 1970, only four years after the pilot model took off. Over the course of ten years, 125 units of various layout and modification options were sold to countries in Asia, Europe and the Republic of Cuba. Export models in comparison with serial ones had a number of differences in the composition of domestic and flight-navigation equipment. The USSR delivered these passenger planes to eighteen countries of the world: Angola, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Vietnam, Zambia, Italy, Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, the Malagasy Republic, Poland, Syria, Germany, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia. In 2000, the Kamchatka airline sold one aircraft to Honduras. Since 1967, the Yak-40 was a member of all aviation showrooms in England, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, Sweden and other countries. This legendary aircraft with demonstration flights of more than five hundred thousand kilometers traveled to many countries not only in Europe, but also in Asia, America, Africa, Australia. It should be noted that the Yak-40 is the first Soviet airliner to be sold to capitalist countries with its own developed aviation industry. These aircraft are still operated by airlines in sixteen countries of the world.
Technical portrait
Consider now the technical specifications. Yak-40, according to passport data, is designed for flights with a length of one and a half thousand kilometers. The wing has a rather large area - 70 square meters, which allowed to abandon the system of very complex multi-gap flaps and slats. Cruising speed is 510 km / h. The main idea of the aircraft design was simplicity, a combination of three jet engines and a large wing, high takeoff and landing characteristics. Traction power of the power unit is one and a half tons. Another advantage of the power plant is the medium engine, which is located in the fuselage, it has a reverse thrust - a special device that allows you to change the direction of the exhaust gas stream when braking the aircraft. This installation allowed to reduce the mileage of the car when landing up to 400 meters. Moreover, the guards for reverse are not an accessory of the engine, but of the aircraft. This is very important for the unification of the power plant and simplify the replacement of the average unit. The chassis of the machine is equipped with a soft cushioning system, this reduces the pressure on the surface of the runway. All this allowed the plane to calmly take off and land at unpaved airfields.
Two people are placed in the cockpit: the commander and the second pilot, however, if necessary, you can install a third seat. Cabin windows have special electric heating. Salon Yak-40 has one that can accommodate from 27 to 32 passengers. The aircraft is equipped with modern aerobatic electronic navigation equipment, which allows you to fly day and night, in rather difficult weather conditions. The equipment includes: autopilot, horizon indicator, heading system, magnetic compass, two automatic radio compasses, directional landing system, radio altimeter for low altitudes. The aircraft is equipped with a highly effective air-thermal system that prevents icing of the hull. A weather radar helps detect lightning fronts along a flight path. According to passport data, the airliner's resource is thirty thousand hours, and the service life is up to 25 years.
Second youth
In 1999, engineers at the Yakovlev Design Bureau carried out research and calculations that showed that the aircraft’s operational life can be doubled by reinforcing the design and refining the airframe. A life extension program will allow companies to delay the need to purchase new aircraft, which will save significant costs. The modernization program includes the replacement of engines with economical power units.
Disasters
A lot of people, and even those who regularly use the services of air carriers, are afraid to fly. And regular air crashes contribute to the development of these phobias. It is useless for such people to show statistical data, according to which much more people die in car accidents than in air accidents. Such an attitude is easily explained, because when an airplane dies, even if they happen very rarely, dozens of people die at the same time. This is always a shock, not only for close victims, but also for strangers. Apparently, the fear is also explained by the fact that the passenger can’t change anything, nothing depends on him, he gives himself and his life into the hands of the pilot and the soulless machine.
So, we will consider the statistics of losses of the Yak-40 airliners. The crash and loss of aircraft for other reasons over the forty-year history of this model exceeded the ten percent barrier. So, from the beginning of operation 117 aircraft were lost. Of these, 46 cars crashed for various reasons, most often due to errors of pilots or air traffic controllers. The remaining 71 Yak-40s were damaged for one reason or another, this includes aircraft destroyed during the war in various hot spots on the planet. Incidentally, the last such machine that was lost is an airliner damaged during the battle for Donetsk Airport on May 26, 2014.
Aircraft Yakovlev
The design bureau of Yakovlev has a rich history. Many different cars came out of its walls, from military aircraft to passenger airliners. Both sports and special-purpose models are produced here, for example, for training pilots. Consider some of them, for example, the Yak-42 aircraft. This model was developed in the mid 70-ies of the last century for flights on the near main airlines of the USSR. Commercial operation of this aircraft began in the 80th year. During its mass production in 1980-2002, 194 aircraft were built. Of these, 64 units of the basic configuration of the Yak-42 and 130 - in an improved modification of the Yak-42D - increased take-off weight and flight range. Cruising speed is 700 km / h. The aircraft is designed for a maximum flight range of four thousand kilometers. The passenger compartment is designed for 120 seats. This aircraft does not need advertising; its merits speak for themselves. After all, he set nine world records! So, in one of them, the Yak-42, intended for near lines, was able to overcome the distance from the capital of Russia to Khabarovsk without landing. Another surprising fact is that before the creation of the Yak-40 and Yak-42 models, the Yakovlev Design Bureau did not at all develop the multi-seat passenger airliners. Their main specialization is training, sports and military fighter aircraft.
Aircraft Yak-18
This aircraft is a descendant of the UT-2L release of the 44th year of the last century. It is intended for the initial training of pilots. In the postwar years, the Yak-18 became the first mass training apparatus. In his concept, equipment and construction, the idea of flying in difficult weather conditions and at night was expressed. The aircraft is equipped with a power unit with a capacity of 160 liters. with., with a variable pitch of the aeromechanical screw. The fuselage design is a proprietary type of steel pipes. The bow is closed by covers of service hatches, and the tail is covered with a cloth. The stabilizers and keel have a metal frame with very rigid profiled socks. Wing - two-spar, detachable, with center section. Detachable consoles and the entire center section up to the first spar have a hard skin, and the rest is covered with canvas. In the Yak-18 model, all the shortcomings of its predecessor were eliminated, it is a very stable and easily controlled aircraft, and has good aerobatic characteristics. The maximum speed of this aircraft is 257 km / h, the climb rate is 4 m / s, the maximum flight altitude is four thousand meters, the flight range is one thousand kilometers, and the landing speed is 85 km / h. The Yak-18 is provided with a number of various instruments that make night and blind flights possible.
The Yak-18t aircraft is a modification of the Yak-18 aircraft. It is a light multi-purpose aircraft. It is one of the safest aircraft used in flight schools. As it was officially said at one of the flight technical conferences, 650 Yak-18Ts flew over one and a half million hours without serious technical faults. In modern design, this aircraft is versatile, it can be passenger, educational, sanitary, transport. In addition, it is used to patrol oil and gas pipelines, power lines, highways and forests, as well as for transporting three passengers at a distance of up to five hundred kilometers.
Sports aircraft from Yakovlev Design Bureau
On May 8, 1979, a small aircraft with bright red wings appeared in the sky near the Tushino airfield. The plane with a slight rumbling famously performed aerobatics: barrels, loops, coups. An experienced eye would immediately note that this is not the usual single-seat sports Yak-50, but a different model. A large forward cockpit light indicated that it was a two-seater. When approaching, it was possible to distinguish other differences: landing shield and nose landing gear. This was a new brainchild from the engineers of the Yakovlev Design Bureau - the Yak-52, an aircraft capable of satisfying the most diverse and conflicting requirements. And this is understandable, because the sports training apparatus needs minimal stability margins, small efforts that the pilot must make to the control handle of the machine. He should easily perform spinning aerobatics. But as an airplane for primary training, on the contrary, it should be very stable and difficult to fly and should not break into a tailspin.
A rather solid set of navigation and aerobatic equipment should be installed on the device for training flights on instruments, and for a sports version it will be only an extra load. A group of engineers and designers faced all these difficulties. Nevertheless, aircraft designers coped with the task perfectly and in the shortest possible time: the Yak-52 was built in less than six months. This is a double all-metal monoplane. The fuselage is a semi-monocoque, it has a working metal casing. It connects to the frame with blind riveting. The wing is a one-spar wing, equipped with landing flaps suspended on ramrod loops and controlled by pneumatic cylinders. The tail unit is free-bearing. The stabilizer and keel are made according to the two-spar scheme. The Yak-52 is equipped with a nine-cylinder piston star-shaped power unit with a capacity of 360 liters. from. with variable pitch automatic screw. Navigation and flight equipment allows you to fly in very difficult weather conditions. In addition to the standard set of instruments, the course system, an ultrashort-wave radio installation and an automatic radio compass are installed on this model. If aerobatics are to be performed, then excess navigational and aerobatic equipment is dismantled.