Peter Dmitrievich Grushin - Early Life
The journey of Pyotr Grushin to design glory was long and difficult. Peter Dmitrievich Grushin was an outstanding Soviet Russian designer of aviation and rocket technology, head of the Fakel Design Bureau (OKB-2) in Khimki, Moscow Region, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences, doctor of technical sciences, professor.
The small Volga town Volsk, in which he was born on January 15, 1906, was not famous for anything. Vol'sk was one of those small towns of the Lower Volga that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century among rare settlements and farmsteads in those regions. His parents did not stand out among the inhabitants of this small town. Father - Grushin Dmitry Karpovich, who was born in 1870 in the village of Yermolovka, Volsky Uezd, was a hereditary carpenter, moreover a village carpenter, and therefore capable of laying floors if necessary and fixing the door. In those years, in Volsk, as well as throughout Russia, there were plenty of wooden houses and work for carpenters was always there. True, they paid little — mostly poor people lived in the city, and the local rich Pligin, Merculiev, and Seyfert, who had stone houses, rarely needed carpenters. So the difficulties with money in the Grushin family were almost constant. Dmitry Karpovich was a deeply religious man, he gave rare hours of rest to reading the Gospel. Naturally, all church posts in the family were observed very strictly.
Mother - Domna Kondratyevna Sudakova - was born in 1875 in Volsk and was the embodiment of the best qualities of a Russian woman - gentle, kind, affectionate. Like most women of the time, she was illiterate and very pious. At first, the young family did not have their own house - they rented a room, and then, when their first daughter Yevgeny was born in the winter of 1900, they moved to the house of one of their relatives. Place and there was a little bit. Often they had to sleep on the floor, and the mattress was replaced by a simple bag stuffed with straw. The second daughter, Claudia, was born in 1904. Peter became the third child in the family. One day, his father took him with him to another construction site: where to put the nail, where to remove the chips. Thus began his real working life, which brought new impressions every day.
In 1917, after graduating from a three-year parochial school, Peter entered the seven-year school, but he did not like studying there. In addition, after seven years of work, it was almost impossible to get a job then. Thoughts turned out to be short-lived, and, not having studied a month, Peter from a seven-year-old passed into the Volsk city technical school, which trained mechanics and turners, and then transferred to the vocational school named after Ilyich. As he later recalled: "The feeling of delight in front of a working machine, the expediency of its construction remained in me for the rest of my life."
At the beginning of the century, aviation, which was known only to shipbuilding, cement and breweries, had never heard of aviation. Only in July 1911 did Alexander Vassiliev, the winner of the first flight Petersburg-Moscow, arrive in Volsk on a "tour"; his airplane circled for several minutes in the air "for the most respectable public." However, the tour flight did not leave any memories for Grushin.
But about another meeting with the "big" aviation, held in the mid-1920s, Grushin often recalled. "That day I returned from classes in the evening, the sun had not yet disappeared. And suddenly, something rattles in the air. “Three planes flew low over the rooftops of the houses and boarded the city,” said Pyotr Dmitrievich. - I'm not the only one — all the young population of the city is straight, through fences and kitchen gardens, rushed to the landing site. We ran to the cars. Nobody scolded us. On the contrary, it was funny for the pilots to see our excitement, allowed what they called “to touch” their planes ..."
This meeting was decisive for Grushin. By that time, he had already been studying at the school, Volsky City College, Ilyich Vocational School. By the age of twenty, he mastered plumbing perfectly, worked on various machines, drove a tractor. And in Volsk, and in neighboring Markstadt and Engels, he had a place to apply his knowledge and skills, but Grushin could not imagine his further life without airplanes.
Starting with the simplest model aircraft, Grushin soon became among the friends recognized authority on aviation and aircraft modeling. During the competition, the models created by his hands, flew farther than others. However, the attempt made by Grushin to become a pilot turned out to be unsuccessful - the medical board did not miss him at the Samara school of military pilots. But soon Grushin received the direction of the Komsomol district committee to study in Leningrad - to the Polytechnic Institute, where in those years there was a department for training engineers for hydroaviation. This time the misfires did not happen, and in the fall of 1928 Grushin became a student. Two years later, in the summer of 1930, the entire department where Grushin studied was transferred to Moscow, to the newly created Moscow Aviation Institute. At that time, most future aviation engineers studied with inspiration - aviation did not accept people who were indifferent and indifferent. But even among his most enthusiastic fellow students, Grushin stood out for his diligence and depth in studying subjects. “In those years, we ran in pursuit of venerable scientists and designers, trying to learn as much as possible about our favorite business,” Grushin recalled his student years. His teachers and mentors were the famous aircraft designer DP Grigorovich, a young, but confidently gaining then force S.V. Ilyushin, a scientist familiar with solutions, offering in return well-designed new, better ones. And it’s not by chance that the student’s name is Grushin.
His thesis project for a light-engine aircraft, which since the beginning of 1932 has worked with fellow students Dmitry Babad and Afanasy Marakazov, turned out to be extraordinary. The project called "Brigadier" was presented by them to the all-Union competition held by the Central Committee of Osoaviahima. 10/13/1932 the newspaper Izvestia wrote about the results of the competition. Among the winners were Grushin, Babad and Marakaz. They were awarded the first prize. The second at that competition was received by engineer Sergey Korolev, who developed a light alloy electron plane.
Grushin, who graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in May 1932, was soon hired by the Bureau of New Design (BNK) of the All-Union Aviation Association. The organization, which was led by the Frenchman Henri Liaville, at that time created the all-metal two-seat fighter JI-4. However, the matter did not go further than the prototype, and in the middle of next year the BNK was closed. In July 1933, after a short work at the plant number 39 of the Moscow Central Design Bureau, Grushin returned to the MAI. In the "alma mater" he was invited to the post of his deputy by the famous aircraft designer DP Grigorovich, whom Grushin liked while still a student. Grigorovich was then overloaded beyond measure: he supervised the design bureau that created the fighters, headed the department of aircraft design and design at MAI, and also led a group of undergraduate and graduate students who designed an all-steel aircraft at MAI. In this group, which grew in time at the Design Bureau of the Moscow Aviation Institute, Grushin began to work, and the plane created in the Design Bureau became his first independent work.
The originality of the aircraft, which was designed for testing long-distance flights and was a kind of backup for the record Tupolev ANT-25, was primarily in the construction material - it was stainless steel. She defined the name of this aircraft - “Steel-MAI named after Yakov Alksnis”. However, by the time the ANT-25 began record flights, the plane did not have time. The first flight on it was made only 09/19/1934, when the ANT-25 had already set the first record of flight range. Naturally, the need for “Steel-MAI” has disappeared, moreover, during its fifth flight, an accident occurred - the engine went dead on take-off, and the plane that had already accelerated had to be sent to a heap of sand on the border of the airfield. The crew, which included Grushin, was not injured, but the aircraft was thoroughly damaged and no longer flew.
The next work of Grushin in MAI was the modernization of the most massive aircraft of the time - the U-2, which consisted in improving its aerodynamics, in installing additional fuel tanks. As a result, the modern U-2 added 15–20 km / h in speed and several hundred kilometers in flight range. But this work did not continue, as well as a number of other attempts: the cost of the U-2 alterations was always much higher than the expected economic effect.
Another work carried out by Grushin at the U-2 was the installation of a small-sized steam turbine on the aircraft. Then he, together with the engines of the Moscow Aviation Institute, created a research stand on which the basic structural elements of the new propulsion system were tested.
This same fame came to Grushin with Oktyabrenok. This small plane was built at the Moscow Aviation Institute in the summer of 1936. But even before it was built, there were heated debates around the “tandem” scheme proposed by Grushin for Oktyabrenka. Having taken to improve the “flying flea” of Frenchman Henri Mignet, popular in those years, Grushin proposed the “tandem” scheme for his aircraft. Only the flight could judge whether the decision was correct. And on October 23, 1936, the Oktyabrenka raised one of the most famous test pilots of the time - Alexander Zhukov. A week later, the Oktyabrenok buzzed triumphantly with its 27-horsepower engine in the sky above the MAI. Disputes about the inefficiency of such a "tandem" subsided by themselves.
For several years, the Oktyabrenok was a kind of symbol of the MAI, it was taken by truck as part of an institute column during festive demonstrations on Red Square, and in 1938 one of its flights at the Tushino Aviation Celebration was specially filmed for newsreels.
The success of Oktyabrenka allowed Grushin to begin building a combat aircraft of a similar pattern. According to the designer, he was supposed to be a high-speed unarmored attack aircraft. This ideology is quite consistent with the time. In those years, the theory of the security of attacks on ground targets at high speed, at low altitude, and diving was popular with many military experts. In addition to the tandem scheme, the arrow tower located in the tail section of the Tandem-MAI (the aircraft was also called MAI-3 and Sh-tandem) tower arrow, which provided the defense of the entire rear hemisphere, became a distinctive feature of the Grushinsky attack aircraft. The aircraft was distinguished by its high adaptability, thanks to which it was manufactured as soon as possible in the MAI workshops.
The first flight of the Tandem-MAI took place on 12/05/1937, and over the next year the aircraft went through the entire routine test program, while confirming the high performance. However, the testers noted a number of shortcomings of the attack tandem. The second copy of the "Tandem MAI", on which most of the shortcomings of the first car were eliminated and, moreover, it was supposed to install a retractable nose landing gear, was never built.
The experience gained during the work on the attack aircraft was soon used by Grushin in creating the next aircraft, BB-MAI. It was intended to be used as a passing bomber, had an all-wooden structure and retractable nose landing gear. Alas, BB-MAI was extremely unlucky. The delayed construction led to the fact that its first flight took place only in December 1940, when the Air Force lost interest in this aircraft. Grushin himself at that time was appointed chief designer at the Kharkov Aviation Plant No. 135 design bureau, and the MAI design bureau, which had been playing the role of a nursery for future engineers and designers for several years, was closed.
The main task that Grushin faced in Kharkov was to ensure the serial production of the BB-1 aircraft at Plant No. 135 - future near-by Su-2 bombers. At the same time, his new design bureau took on the creation of the long-range single-seat escort fighter DIS-135 (Gr-1). Similar work was then carried out by a number of organizations, including the NNPolikarpov and A.I. Mikoyan design offices. Thanks to the form of work organization proposed by Grushin, resembling the cost accounting that was popular much later, Kharkiv citizens were among the leaders. Their plane in mid-June 1941 was ready for the first flight. But because of the outbreak of war, he was transported for testing in the Moscow Region LII.
There, when one of its engines was launched, the plane was damaged and had to be evacuated to the Urals, to Perm, where the Kharkov aircraft factory had already been transferred. But in Perm it was not possible to prepare the Gr-1 for flights - in January 1942 the plant was disbanded.
The new appointment of Grushin was S. Lavochkin Design Bureau, which worked in Gorky. There, in the summer of 1942, the La-5 fighter began to be launched into the series. The task set before Grushin this time was formulated in a military manner - to ensure the speedy serial release of these fighters. And in the fall of 1942, the first La-5 took part in the battles at Stalingrad, and on December 5, 1942, the Gorky Aviation Plant reported on the start of the mass production of new fighters. The role of Grushin in this work in June 1943 was awarded the Order of Lenin.
In the spring of 1943, Grushin was transferred to Moscow by the chief engineer at the aircraft factory No. 381, where the production of Lavochkin-La-7 fighters was also developing. Here, at the initiative of Grushin, a number of innovations were introduced on the La-7 fighters, which made it possible to increase the combat effectiveness of these aircraft: the armament was strengthened, the cockpit was sealed, and other improvements were made.
In the first post-war years, preparation for the serial production of the I-250 fighter (designed by A.I. Mikoyan and M.I. Gurevich) and prototypes of the fighter jet design bureau S.A.Lavochkin - La-150 took place at the plant number 381.
In October 1946, Grushin went to work at the Ministry of Aviation Industry, then worked in the Special Committee on Jet Technology. In September 1948, Grushin returned to the MAI, becoming the dean of the aircraft-building department, and then the vice-rector of the institute for scientific work.
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