Avijacija bez granica...

[ivy]

pa iscimaj se,sta ti fali..ako nista bice lepo vreme,napravite lep izlet u Vs..malo aero,malo centar,malo kula/breg,rucak i gotovo...ja sam uvek za izlet u Vrscu :)

[wall]

Idem da lobiram. ^_^

[akibono]

Bambi sa Batajnice :)

 

(još fotki i malo priče kod Dimitrija na sajtu - http://dimitrijeostojic.com/blog/the-bamby-on-apron-2/)

 

 

[bigvlada]

ruska vizija vojnog transportnog aviona budućnosti

 

[bigvlada]

PAK FA

 

testovi

 

i problemi, ovaj je sleteo sa zapaljenim motorom. Zato ih maksimalno njakaju prilikom testiranja, da se potrebe ovakve bube. 

 

 

[bigvlada]

 

[bigvlada]

A Soviet-Built L-1011kov? Almost — Too Bad It Never Flew
By Bernie Leighton on January 9th, 2014



I bet most people thought this was a joke! Photo: Chris Sloan | Airchive.com

The 1970s were a time of economic malaise for the west. Weirdly, the Soviet Union was chugging along at its own egregious and bizarre pace, and Soviet air travel needs had never been more pressing. Millions of Warsaw Pact and Soviet citizens needed to shuttle around the Iron living room. In fact, Aeroflot celebrated its hundred-millionth-passenger year in 1976. This called for larger aircraft. Engine technology issues were holding up Ilyushin’s domestic design, which we now know as the mostly-extinct IL-86.

The program to which the IL-86 stemmed from was formally known as the “aerobus”. The IL-86 was not supposed to be the only aircraft of the family of short, medium, and long-haul indigenous widebody aircraft.

Tupolev had stepped up to offer the Tu-184, an aircraft that was similar to a twin-aisle Dassault Mercure. Thankfully, at the time of its inception Andre Tupolev was still alive. He took one look at it and decided that the company should not waste any resources on what he was sure would be nothing but a reputation-wrecking disaster. Not that Tupolev was immune to civil aviation failures, they are simply beyond the scope of this article. They were also, usually, swept under the rug and blamed on Myashischev (a competing design bureau).

The IL-86 itself was originally supposed to be a widebody IL-62. Same T-tail, similar cabin-window layout, and identical engine positions. The Soviet government stepped in and said that the design “looked antiquated”. That was the end of that.

The next set of aerobus edicts demanded wing-mounted engines and a “modern” six-to-eight-piece flight deck window set. Would the original IL-86 studies have been more successful than what the Soviets ended up with? Probably not, as there was really nothing in their engine arsenal that had the bypass ratios to produce either the thrust or the necessary efficiency.

If that was not enough, the government, suspicious that airports in Siberia would not be able to offload baggage quickly, demanded that their precious aerobus had something eventually dubbed the “luggage at hand” system. In other words, passengers would check their own bags in after boarding through airstairs built into the lower deck. During the latter days of the IL-86, this was never used.


As the IL-86 was going nowhere, the Soviets, in a rather landmark move reached out to American manufacturers. McDonnell Douglas balked. However, Lockheed, suffering from their own engine issues and always a company interested in earning political capital, decided to send an L-1011 to Moscow in March of 1974.

In what, at the time, must have come as a surprise, the Soviets decided to order 30 L-1011s. They also wanted to build up to 100 per year domestically. It would have been a landmark order in monetary terms, and probably changed some of the dynamics of the Cold War. But we can’t have that now, can we?

President Carter had the DOD and Department of Commerce investigate any potential ITARS issues. Naturally, there was a tangential one. The RB-211 engine used composite fan-blades. The Soviets had no industrial process for that, nor did they ever consider it a wise idea (something Rolls Royce probably wished they had decided). The deal, as if by design, fell apart.

If that was not enough, the Department of Commerce also blocked the sale of General Electric CF-6-50 engines. The Soviets had planned to use this engine in their own indigenous wide-body projects. The Soviet high-bypass engine solutions were running behind schedule, and the L-1011 deal would have allowed them the necessary time to properly develop an iteration of the IL-86, probably CF-6 powered. When Soviet engines of the same thrust class were ready, there would be indigenously-powered versions only.

Strangely, if the deal had gone through, the Soviet Union (then Russia and the former Republics) would actually have not only been the largest operator of the L-1011, but also would have built far more than the parent designer.

The Russians, feeling rather jilted and already in possession of measurements and actual Lockheed L-1011 documentation, decided to not let this denial get them down. Being the largest, oldest, and most politically-active OKB of the Soviet Union, Tupolev decided that they could step up.

Having said that, this design was so far from clean-sheet, Antonov, Yakovlev, TANKT Beriev, and even Myashishchev were also told to do the same. Outright design copying was actually strictly forbidden. It was a very strict code amongst Soviet engineers that they would always come up with an indigenous solution. Indeed, building too many copies of the Me-262 cost Semyon Alekseyev his design bureau, resulting in the shuttering of OKB-1, and the unfortunate creation of the Baade 152.

I say that they did not let the documentation and measurements they had go to waste because the requirement from the government was almost literally, “you will build us an L-1011. It will be this long, or longer.” Not much freedom there.

Yakovlev managed to lose all its civil credibility just as the project was gaining momentum. The series of disasters with the early Yak-42s all but sidelined them from any L-1011 cloning.

Myashischev, deciding to do what they always did, ignored the RFP and decided to draw pictures of what a five-year-old would think an airplane would look like after being fed a package of gummy bears.

By the late 1980’s, when Myashischev had run out of money, the resulting M-52 is something that lacks polite description. The project was only allowed to continue for so long as the passenger pod could be replaced with relevant, heavy, space-related payloads.

TANKT Beriev, much like Myashishchev, thought the best way to get anywhere with the project was to bring it into a realm they could understand. That realm, as for most things Beriev, was water. While I cannot directly source just how many of their 1970s to mid-80s lifting body flying boats were 100% attributable to the aerobus specifications, there were definitely 3-5-3 (500 seat) models described in the brochures as “aerobuses.”

Now that we have seen what the perennial also-rans of Soviet experimental design companies came up with, it is time to look at what the “adults” designed. I should mention that by the 1970s, at least in the case of Myashischev, when they actually designed something correctly the projects were usually stolen and put under the stewardship of a more mature OKB.

Guess what? They all look like the L-1011. So much so that I’ve started to call them Tri-Zvezdy.

The most fascinating part of this saga is that Tupolev’s L-1011-esque widebody passenger aircraft was to be called the Tu-204. Except this Tu-204 was going to sport high-bypass engines made by Lotarev, and seat between 350 and 400 people. As you can probably see, it included some fairly distinctive Tupolev passenger aircraft features.

If the engines had matched their prospective performance targets (and they did to some degree; these are the same engines that eventually became the Ivchenko-Progress D-18Ts used on the AN-124) the aircraft would have had a range similar to that of the L-1011-500. I am told that the registration on the model indicates that Tupolev believed that the latest they would get their superstar into service with Aeroflot was 1987 or 1988.

Eventually, Tupolev realized that Ilyushin had the “larger than twin” aircraft market locked down and turned the Tu-204 into more of an A330-size aircraft. Still, seen as too large, it became the aircraft we know today (which looks very similar to the Boeing 757).

Antonov, somewhat a stranger to the widebody world, took some advanced papers on wing-related induced drag – and thought the solution was to take a design almost identical to the above Tu-204 and put winglets on it. It was not a bad idea; their version would have had a longer range.

All of those were great ideas, but why were they never built? Politics. Ilyushin was always able to convince the government that whilst their current IL-86 was vastly underperforming and experiencing issues operating in cold climates, the “real” IL-86 was just around the corner. What also saved the IL-86 was that it had such a huge amount of floorspace, that the military loved the idea of using it for various crazy projects.

There was one for testing a Soviet airborne laser and one was tested to be the equivalent of America’s E-6B mercury. It had space, it could be refueled inflight, and it was “off the shelf.” Eventually, saner generals realized that the sheer amount of fuel it would need to stay airborne on long missions was impossible to carry along with mission-specific equipment.

What were some of these IL-86s, you ask? Well, one had two decks with a 600 passenger capacity. Most amazing of all, it still seemed to have been powered by Kuznetsov NK-8s. Eventually, engine technology advanced, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the closest thing to the original IL-86 and Aerobus brief took flight; the IL-96..

Sometimes, I sit back and daydream about what would have happened if the L-1011 deal had gone through. Would I have flown to Pyongyang on an Air Koryo, Voronezh-built, Tristar? Wouldn’t that have looked amazing!

 

http://www.airlinereporter.com/2014/01/l1011kov-shame-they-never-flew/

[bigvlada]

 

[hazard]

Hiljade nuklearnih reaktora iznad nasih glava u svakom trenutku! Moram reci da mi je drago da ta zamisao nije ostverena. :D

 

 

Inace, ovaj clanak o sovjetskim putnickim avionima je vrlo interesantan :)

[bigvlada]

Hiljade nuklearnih reaktora iznad nasih glava u svakom trenutku! Moram reci da mi je drago da ta zamisao nije ostverena. :D

 

 

Inace, ovaj clanak o sovjetskim putnickim avionima je vrlo interesantan :)

 Dobro nije hiljade, samo desetine. :)  Imaš i bombe i reaktore izgubljene po močvarama, okeanima kao i nekoliko desetina satelita u parkirnoj (junk) orbiti. Poenta je da smo pre 50+ godina imali tehnologiju kako nuklearnih aviona tako i nuklearnih kosmičkih brodova. Premotaj nekoliko decenija unapred i imaćemo fuzione varijante. 

[hazard]

Orbita je daleko, a i štiti :D Za fuziju treba biti skeptičan, to je jedna od onih tehnologija što uvek 20 godina daleko, i kad čitaš članke iz '55. i '65. i '75. i '95. i '05. [emoji53] mada bi ja naravno voleo da ITER da neke rezultate. Takođe to što je nešto bilo na papiru pa možda čak i izvodljivo kao prototip pre 50 godina ne znači da je bilo dovoljno pouzdano za serijsku proizvodnju i masovnu upotrebu, o isplativosti da ne pričamo.

[bigvlada]

Za onoliko radijacije koliko su svi kolektivno pustili u atmosferu tokom par decenija testiranja je moglo da se lansira par Oriona od 8000 tona nosivosti. Važno je da su postojali i ljudi i ideje kako sabiti nuklearni reaktor na dovoljno mali prostor da stane u avion. Možda će sledeći korak biti mini torijumski podkritični reaktor sa akceleratorom.  

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How a Tax Issue Launched the Boeing 707

 

 

Boeing chairman Bill Allen

In a past blog post I had mentioned that while most of aviation history is a study in technological progress, it as much shaped by the individuals and their personality traits as it is any development in aeronautics. That past posting back in March 2010 dealt with C. Edward Acker's personality and how it shaped Air Florida and impacted the newly-deregulated market in the United States in the 1980s. While someone like Acker brimmed with swagger and bravado, there as many individuals in the history of aviation who, by nature of their quiet reserve, are often overlooked as movers and shakers. I recently have been reading Sam Howe Verhovek's book Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World and he places Boeing's chairman at the time of the launch of the 707, Bill Allen, as one of the true visionaries and business leaders in the industry. I have to admit my own understanding of Bill Allen up to this point was that while he shaped Boeing tremendously into what it is today in the commercial airliner market, he hardly filled the role of visionary, looking very much like many of the management types that you could have pulled from central casting for a 1950s-era movie. But what was it about Bill Allen that makes him a central figure in Verhovek's book? When he assumed the leadership role in Boeing in 1950, Boeing held less than 1% of the commercial airliner business that was dominated by Douglas and Lockheed. Though stunningly successful in the Second World War with its bomber designs, Bill Allen rightly saw that the growing air travel market represented a bigger prize than any military contract. But with a fraction of the commercial market, Boeing was already seen as a three-time loser in the race- the Boeing 247 was too small compared to the Douglas DC-3, the Boeing 314s were only built in small numbers primarily for Pan Am, and the landmark Boeing 307 Stratoliner was a flop that hardly made a dent in the marketplace.

Bill Allen wasn't a pilot and he wasn't even an engineer. He would have readily admitted to not knowing much about either when it came to aviation. But he had his start as the company lawyer who handled the legal paperwork for Bill Boeing's timber business and then his aircraft company. Before long, Allen was one of those quiet in-the-background individuals that everyone saw Boeing himself often sought out for advice. When Boeing quit the company in 1934, Philip Johnson took his place and led the company through a dramatic expansion during the Second World War- and again, Johnson came to rely on Allen for advice and counsel on company decisions. When Johnson died of a stroke in his fifties, there was only one person the rank and file at Boeing would trust- and that was Bill Allen. But he found himself a single parent to two young girls after losing his wife to cancer when the offer from the board came to him.

Maybe it was loyalty and maybe it was that he was part of Boeing since its early days as a timber company, but he took the job- but at the time, the airline industry was content with its Douglas and Lockheed piston propliners and Allen had a tough time selling the airlines on the idea of a jet. For many airlines, the jet was an unknown. Well, it was- until the De Havilland Comet took flight and electrified the world with its speed and grace. By 1952 the British aeronautical industry was the talk of the world with Eastern's Eddie Rickenbacker and Pan Am's Juan Trippe openly discussing orders of the Comet. It was an about face by the world's airlines and the US airline industry in particular that just a year earlier thought jet technology too immature for the traveling public.

 

Bill Allen on the right shows the Dash 80 to Bill Boeing.


Many companies wanted government subsidy to develop a jet airliner- Boeing's own engineers had been applying their experience in developing the B-47 Stratojet and the B-52 Stratofortress towards the company's own project which was designated Model 367-80 (the Model 367 was the C-97 Stratofreighter- the Dash 80 was designated such for secrecy, leading competitors to think it was just an improved version of the C-97). The costs of developing the Dash 80 amounted to a quarter of the company's value and to go it alone without government development aid represented a tremendous financial risk. There was many pros as there were cons in Allen's mind when it came to launching a jetliner.

But, Allen's own legal background was in tax law. During the Korean War, the Congress put what was called an "excess profits" tax in place to prevent companies from profiteering from the war effort. A company's baseline was set at its profilts made during the peacetime period of 1946 to 1949. Anything above that level in profits was subject to the tax. That period was a hard time on Boeing with the cancellation of numerous wartime contracts and profits during those years were slim at best. But with the ramp up in defense spending during the Korean War, Boeing's fortunes improved dramatically and that meant that the company was fully exposed to the excess profits tax while Douglas and Lockheed's profits during that time were higher thanks to their own commercial airliner production. That meant that Boeing would owe 82 cents on every dollar of profit while Douglas only would owe 68 cents and Lockheed only 48 cents on each dollar of profit.

 

Having a flying prototype gave Boeing an advantage.

Under most circumstances, Bill Allen might have gone to the state of Washington Congressional delegation for a political fix. But being the tax lawyer, he saw an opportunity- Take Boeing's profits and invest them heavily into the Boeing 707 project- that amount would be deducted from the profits and written off as a business expense. Boeing wouldn't need government aid to develop a new jetliner and it reduced the company's tax exposure. Allen pitched the idea to the Boeing board as an investment in the company's future that would put it at the forefront of jetliner development. In addition, company funding of a demonstrator aircraft would not only give the airlines something to see and ride as a flying design, it would also put Boeing in the lead for the USAF's plans for a new jet tanker to support its growing B-52 Stratofortress fleet. In a stroke of what some might call genius, Bill Allen could kill three birds with one stone- reduce Boeing's tax exposure, get a flying jetliner demonstrator, and use that demonstrator to get the jet tanker contract. That was the engineering genius of the Dash 80- it appealed to both airlines and the USAF for disparate roles. Boeing's competition for the jet tanker hadn't optimized their designs as transports as fully as Boeing had with the Dash 80.

It only took a month to get the go-ahead from the board of directors. In the summer of 1952, Bill Allen issued short statement to the press:

"The Boeing Company has for some time been engaged in a company-financed project which will enable it to demonstrate a prototype jet airplane of a new design to the armed services and the commercial airlines in the summer of 1954."

The rest, as they say, is history!

 

Source: Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World by Sam Howe Verhovek. Penguin Group, 2010, p84-110. Photos: Smithsonian, Boeing.

 

http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-tax-issue-launched-boeing-707.html

[bigvlada]

The Genesis of the Airbus A320




As far back as the late 1960s while the Airbus Industrie was still a start up finalizing the design of the A300 was there a realization among the major airframe manufacturers of Europe that there would be a need for a single-aisle aircraft to replace the aging fleets of BAC One-Elevens, Tridents, and Caravelles. A multitude of designs emerged from the various companies as there was a common desire for a "European" competitor to the highly successful Douglas DC-9 and Boeing 737 airliners. By the new decade, only France and the UK had the industrial capacity and expertise in putting a such an aircraft into service, but the UK was reeling from not just the withdrawal from the Airbus consortium, but the eventual cancellation of the BAC Three-Eleven project that caused the UK to withdraw from Airbus in the first place. France was putting its weight behind the Dassault Mercure, but the devaluation of the US dollar, the increase in the price of oil following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and Arab oil embargo and the short range of the Mercure (at full payload it was barely a 1000 miles) meant that the Mercure wasn't the aircraft the airline industry wanted at the time. BAC found itself reliant on new versions of the BAC One-Eleven, the 475 and 500 variants, but even these designs were failing miserably against Boeing and McDonnell Douglas on the world market.

At the 1971 Paris Air Show BAC announced the QSTOL (Quiet Short Take Off/Landing) airliner which looked like a scaled up, wide-body version of the later BAe-146 airliner. But BAC lacked the financial capital to commit the QSTOL to production and the UK government, smarting after the cancellation of the BAC Three-Eleven and the bankruptcy of Rolls-Royce, was hesitant to fund the launch of the QSTOL and project died quietly that year. In February of the following year BAC formed a consortium with MBB of West Germany and Saab-Scania of Sweden to develop the Europlane with the realization that a joint venture was the only way to secure the financing to launch production of any new jetliner. CASA of Spain joined later than year and at the 1972 Farnborough Air Show, the Europlane was announced only to be redesigned for the 1973 Paris Air Show as a CF6/RB.211 rear twinjet with a T-tail that borrowed heavily from the BAC Three-Eleven design. But politics intervened- with MBB heavily committed to the A300 program, Aerospatiale saw the Europlane as distracting MBB from full commitment to Airbus Industrie. Eventually, the Europlane, too, died quietly.

But while the Europlane venture was active, Hawker Siddeley formed a rival team called CAST (Civil Aircraft Study Team) with VFW-Fokker and Dornier to look into a family of aircraft to compete with Europlane. CAST got off the ground in 1972 and though design studies never got as far as Europlane did, one design did emerge that was a single-aisle twin with underwing engines. At the 1974 Farnborough Air Show, the Group of Six was announced- a new consortium to replace both Europlane and CAST with both BAC and Hawker Siddeley, Aerospatiale, both Dornier and MBB, and VFW-Fokker. The Group of Six combined the work of Europlane and CAST into a new project that featured two designs- a 200 seater designated Type A and a 110+ seater designated Type B. The Type A design became the Airbus A310. With the entry of Dassault into the consortium it became the Group of Seven. The British offered new variants of the both Trident and One-Eleven and the French offered two designs, the Aerospatiale A200 and the similar looking Dassault Mercure 200 with CFM56 engines.

This attempt at the Type B from the Group of Seven ended when the French insisted upon a lead role and Dassault broke away to pursue a joint venture with McDonnell Douglas based on the Mercure 200 design. That effort also failed due to issues of design leadership between the two companies and with the nationalization of the BAC in 1977 to form British Aerospace, the new BAe, needing a new cornerstone in the commercial market, abandoned further development of versions of the One-Eleven and joined forces with Airbus that year to develop an all-new 150-seat single-aisle aircraft under the program name of JET (Joint European Transport). BAe was offered a lead role in JET with final assembly in the UK provided the British returned to Airbus Industrie. JET was made up of British Aerospace (BAe), with Airbus being represented by MBB, VFW-Fokker, and Aerospatiale. Hawker Siddeley, now part of BAe, led the design effort for JET and created JET1, a 136-seater, and JET2, a 163-seater. Both aircraft were influenced by Aerospatiale's own previous A200 design. Both designs were powered by the GE/SNECMA CFM56 engine and early on a decision was made for a fuselage diameter larger than that of the Boeing 727/737 to allow a more comfortable six-abreast seating arrangement than that of the Boeing jets. After discussion with potential airline customers, JET1 was dropped and efforts were focused on JET2.

 

In 1978 JET2 was formalized with BAe being responsible for lead design and final assembly in the UK and Airbus Industrie responsible for coordinating BAe's European partners. In the following year the UK returned to the Airbus consortium and curiously, the JET2 team was relocated to Toulouse, France and in 1980 JET2 was redesignated under the SA (Single Aisle) designator with SA1, SA2, and SA3 being various lengths of the JET2 design.

At the same time that JET2 was moved to Toulouse, Delta Air Lines issued its "Delta III" requirement for a 150-seater with 50% of the fuel burn of the Boeing 727 that formed the bulk of Delta's US domestic fleet. Keen to enlarge its market share in the United States, Airbus consulted with Delta on the the Delta III specifications and focused much of the SA work around Delta's requirements. This aircraft was finalized in 1984 and launched by Airbus Industrie as the A320. The UK government and the British aircraft industry unions pushed hard to have A320 final assembly moved back to the UK, but the increased financial commitment Airbus required to establish final production of the A320 in the UK met with disapproval by the British Parliament and A320 assembly remained where it is to this day at Toulouse.

 

Ironically Delta never ended up ordering the A320 despite its needs having shaped the A320's design significantly. Much in the same way American Airlines shaped the A300 design nearly 15 years earlier, it was only years later after the A320 program was well-established that Delta ended up operating the A320, but not as a customer but as the merger partner with Northwest Airlines in 2009 which itself had a substantial A320 fleet as well as the shorter A319.

Source: Stuck on the Drawing Board: Unbuilt British Commercial Aircraft Since 1945 by Richard Payne. Tempus Publishing, 2004, p162-175.

 

http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.com/2010/10/genesis-of-airbus-a320.html