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RL Bartini "R" supersonic interceptor

Roberto Ludovic Bartini (Roberto Oros de Bartini) was a Soviet aircraft designer, scientist. He was born in Fiume (Rijeka, Yugoslavia). In 1937, Robert Ludwigovich was arrested. He was charged with links with the "enemy of the people" Tukhachevsky, as well as in espionage and the favor of Mussolini (from which he once fled!). He was sentenced to 10 years in camps. Until 1947 he worked in detention, first in the Central Design Bureau-29 of the NKVD. In July 1936 Tupolev's design and construction effort was formally separated from the TsAGI and reorganized as Plant 156. In 1941, plant No. 156 was evacuated with the design bureau of the TsKB-29 to in Omsk. Here in Omsk, at the beginning of the war, a special design bureau was created by RL Bartini, who developed two projects. In the autumn of 1943, the OKB was closed. Until 1946 he worked in detention in the so-called. "Sharashka". In 1956 Bartini was rehabilitated.

A "sound barrier" in aerodynamics is a sharp jump in air resistance, which occurs when the aircraft reaches a certain boundary velocity, close to the speed of sound. When this speed is reached, the air flow around the airplane changes cardinally, which in its time greatly hampered the achievement of supersonic speeds. Normal, subsonic, the aircraft is not able to fly faster than sound faster, no matter how it is accelerated, - it will simply lose control and fall apart. To overcome the sound barrier, designers had to develop a wing with a special aerodynamic profile and come up with other tricks.

As early as 1937, the German Messerschmitt Company developed the jet plane, the Me-262 Schwalbe (Swallow). It was flown experimentally in 1941 with a piston engine and then successfully in 1942 with jet engines, but was rejected by the Luftwaffe. During the Second World War, German designers worked actively on this issue, hoping to reverse the course of the war with the help of such aircraft. As is well known, they did not succeed, and the war ended. A prototype of the jet powered Me-262 was flown by Adolf Galland, General of Fighter Pilots, in May 1943. In 1945, German pilot L. Hoffman, testing the world's first jet fighter Me-262, at an altitude of 7200 m was able to develop a speed of about 980 km/hr [Mach 0.8]. During World War II, the Germans developed the rocket-propelled Me-163 Komet. It was very fast - but ineffective mainly due to high fuel consumption.

The first who embodied the dream of all the pilots to overcome the supersonic barrier was the American test pilot Chuck Yeager. In 1947, this pilot was the first in history to overcome the speed of sound on a manned vehicle. He flew the experimental Bell X-1 with a rocket engine. The flight was kept secret, and the world wouldn't know about the first supersonic flight until months later.

In 1940, S. A. Khristianovich published his first paper in Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute (TsAGI) proceedings. The work was based on the method developed by Sergey Alekseevich Chaplygin and offered a solution to the problem of the flow around an airfoil at high velocities approaching the velocity of sound. One of the most important achievements of TsAGI in the war years was finding methods for creating a special wind tunnel for transonic tests. The first Supersonic speed tests were performed by the Soviet TsAGI using wind tunnels in 1947.

In the Soviet Union, the speed of sound was first reached on December 26, 1948. It was an experimental aircraft LA-176, at a flight altitude of 9060 meters, which was piloted by I.E. Fedorov and O.V. Sokolovsky. Approximately a month later, this plane, but with a more advanced engine, was not only achieved, but the speed of sound was exceeded, at 7000 meters. The La-176 was destroyed when its canopy failed during supersonic flight. Test pilot I.V. Sokolovsky was killed. The LA-176 project was very promising, but due to the tragic death of O.V. Sokolovsky, who piloted this aircraft, the development was closed. In February 1950, the pilot I.T. Ivashchenko was the first in the world to exceed the speed of sound in a horizontal flight in the MiG-17 serial fighter. The era of supersonic aviation began.

RL Bartini began to work on the proposal for a jet plane "R", a supersonic single-seat fighter of the "flying wing" type. At the takeoff, the propulsion system operated as a liquid jet engine (LRE) with air intake. Then at high speeds, the engine operated as a ram jet engine with the use of fuel vapor injection. Bartini's team carried out experiments with an injector of this kind to confirm the correctness of the proposed concept.

The design speed of the "R" aircraft could reach 1250 kilometers per hour [Mach 1.02] at an altitude of 10,000 meters, and the flight duration was 30 minutes. This is achieved by transforming the outer compartments of the wing into flat, straight-through combined engines, in which air was injected with superheated fuel and oxidizer vapors with the recovery of internal and external heating of the surface of the structure. Due to this, it was supposed to increase the thrust and lift of the wing, to reduce the resistance of the aircraft.