In my last blog we discussed the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber, a remarkable reengineered clone of the B29. This time let’s look at the series of developments that led to the highly successful Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 jet fighter.
At the end of World War II Russian fighter and bomber designs were significantly behind US, UK and German accomplishments. Stalin, who was deeply paranoid, feared that his successful generals might stage a revolt against him, led by the immensely popular Marshal Zhukov. He used the poor state of Soviet military aviation to stage the ‘Aviators Affair,’ in which approximately 20 senior air force commanders were awarded one-way tickets to the Gulag, as the Soviet forced-labor prison system was known.
Although his true purpose was to oust the generals who might have ousted him, Stalin’s pretext was a real one. The Russians had focused (correctly) their aviation efforts on ground attack aircraft to support their armies pushing the Germans back in the brutal war of attrition across Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. This focus had left them without any heavy bombers like the UK’s Lancasters and Wellingtons or the US’s B17s and B29s, and without any jet-engined aircraft like the German Messerschmitt 262s or the UK’s Gloster Meteors.
As we saw in my last blog the Russians solved the long-range bomber problem by reengineering four B29s which had made emergency landings in Russia during the war. It took two years, was extremely challenging from an engineering perspective, but the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber surprised the world when it was unveiled in 1947.
The transition from propeller-driven to jet-propelled fighters was accomplished by a series of brilliant cloning exercises of a similar nature. First, they took captured German Junkers Jumo 004 engines and fitted them to the existing piston-powered Yakovlev Yak 3 as the Yak 15. Then they took BMW 003s and installed them on a rapidly designed new airframe, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-9. Both these aircraft flew in April 1946, to the amazement of western observers. Unfortunately, the first-generation German engines were extremely unreliable, and jet-powered airframe design was in its infancy. (For example, the tail wheel of the Yak 15 was located immediately behind the jet exhaust and was therefore prone to melting.)
As a next step, the engineer Vladimir Klimov suggested that Russia should ask the British government to sell some Rolls Royce Nene engines, then the most advanced and powerful centrifugal flow engine in the world. Stalin scoffed at the idea, famously asking ‘what fool would sell us his secrets?’ but let the inquiry go ahead. To Stalin’s amazement the British prime minister Clement Attlee and the President of the Board of Trade Sir Stafford Cripps (previously British ambassador in Moscow) agreed to the deal.
Just as we saw in the case of the B29/Tu-4 illegal cloning, Klimov reverse-engineered the Nene into the Klimov VK-1.
The Rolls Royce Nene and its licensed and stolen derivaties.
(Top to bottom: Rolls Royce Nene, Soviet Kilmov K1, Pratt & Whitney J42 and J48)
While Klimov duplicated the design without permission, licensed derivatives included the successful Pratt & Whitney J42 and J48 jet engines which powered first generation US fighters.
There are stories that Klimov visited the Rolls-Royce factory in England wearing special soft-soled shoes so that he could step on metal-alloy shavings and steal them for metallurgical analysis. As far as I know these stories are not true, but, as a writer of fiction, I wish they were.
Meanwhile, the great engineering challenge for the airframe designers was stability at trans-sonic speeds, as ever more powerful jet engines pushed aircraft toward the shock waves of the sound barrier. The conventional straight-wing design of all aircraft up to and including the Mig 9 became increasingly unstable. The Mikoyan-Gurevich engineers therefore replaced the Mig 9’s straight wings with 35º swept wings for their next fighter, the Mig 15, which could remain stable even when pushed by the powerful Nene-cloned KV-1.
Transitional wing evolution
The Mig-15 first flew in 1947, two years after the end of the war and a few months after the Tu-4 shocked western observers. It proved to be a brilliantly successful fighter.
Mig-15s were deployed in large numbers during the Korean War and astonished their US and British adversaries. They were highly effective against B29s and superior to all UN aircraft except the F86 Sabre. The precise numbers of aircraft shot down by Mig-15s are disputed, but the head of the RAF said: “not only is it faster than anything we are building today, but it is already being produced in very large numbers. The Russians, therefore, have achieved a four-year lead over British development in respect of the vitally important interceptor fighter.”
