For an aircraft that was produced in relatively small numbers, the Yakovlev Yak-2 has a surprisingly
complex history.
Unfortunately, not a huge number of photos exist of this aircraft, and instead of repeating
the same photo several times throughout the video, I am going to include some footage
of the Yak-2 as it appears in the game War Thunder – hopefully this isn’t too jarring
of a change, and you all still enjoy the video.
By the late 1930s Alexander Yakovlev had become one of the best-known aircraft designers in
the Soviet Union, but his fame came from the development of sporting and trainer aircraft.
He was an ambitious man and he wanted to turn his attention to the development of military
aircraft…there was just one problem with that: Stalin.
During this time, a lot of the major decisions on which Soviet weapons were adopted were
personally made by Stalin.
For various reasons that usually included words like ‘gulag’ or ‘firing squad’,
it was not advisable to go against Stalin’s wishes, and when it came to aircraft design
his main desire was speed.
Yakovlev was aware of this, and with his experience of building racing aircraft he was confident
in his endeavours.
If he could produce a fast aircraft – provided it looked like a practical warplane and was
at least nominally intended to fly military missions – not only would it go into mass
production, but he himself would get into Stalin’s good favour.
And so, Yakovlev began designing his new fast aircraft…and this is where I enter some
uncertain ground when it comes to facts and source material.
Many sources conflict with another on at least one point when it comes to the design and
development of the Yak-2 prototype.
After consulting with a friend who knows a bit more about these things, I decided to
go with the two sources that are in the video description below; however, if anyone out
there has any other sources they can recommend for Soviet aircraft development, feel free
to leave a comment.
Now, the prototype.
Yakovlev went with a twin-engine low-wing monoplane design.
It was of a mixed construction, with a twin-tail, fully retractable hydraulically powered undercarriage,
and fully enclosed cockpits for a pilot in the nose and a navigator behind the wing.
The wing was made entirely of wood, comprising of box spars and double-sided ribs, and it
was covered in a ply skin.
The streamlined fuselage was a mix of wood and metal, with the nose and rear fuselage
built on welded steel tubing and the central section being made entirely of wood.
This central section was made integral with the wing and was also skinned with plywood.
The rear fuselage was based on a truss of welded steel tube bracing which was covered
in fabric, and the whole arrangement was attached to the central fuselage by fourteen removeable
bolts.
The control surfaces were made from a mix of duraluminium, wood and fabric.
The ailerons were operated by push/pull tubes and had no control tabs, and the available
trailing edge inboard and outboard of the engines were occupied by all-metal split flaps.
These were hydraulically operated and could be depressed down to a maximum angle of 55
degrees.
In the tail, the elevators and rudder were a mix of metal and fabric and were driven
by cables.
Interestingly, the tailplane had all-metal skin, fins, and ribs, but the two main spars
were wood.
To power this streamlined package, Yakovlev chose the Klimov M-103 liquid cooled V12 engine.
These provided a take-off power of 960hp each and drove a three-blade variable pitch propeller.
The fuel was kept in four tanks that were housed inboard and outboard of the engines,
and two more tanks in the centre of the fuselage – giving a total fuel capacity of 1,232
litres.
This aircraft was known as the Ya-22 simply the aircraft no.22.
When completed it featured no military equipment, and this was because Yakovlev’s aim was
to build the fastest aircraft possible that *looked* capable of flying military missions,
rather than being designed with a specific role in mind.
Now this is one of those statements in which the source materials conflicts, so just bear
that in mind.
Supposedly, Yakovlev chose to label it as a reconnaissance aircraft.
The intention was to have a 7.62mm machine gun in the nose, and another to be mounted
aft and operated by the navigator.
Along with this, provision was to be made for space in the fuselage to hold camera equipment
and a small armament of light bombs.
But all of this was hypothetical and never done, and so the aircraft was delivered unarmed
and unequipped for any kind of military duty.
When it appeared in Moscow, the prototype caught a lot of attention.
It looked promisingly agile for a twin engine aircraft.
It had a length of 9.34 meters, and a wingspan of 14 meters.
It had an empty weight of 3796 kg and a maximum loaded weight of 5,123kg.
Its range of 1,000km was a bit mediocre, but its speed was very impressive, being able
to achieve 567 km/h at an altitude of 4,900 meters.
It took off for the first time from the Moscow Central Aerodrome in early February 1939.
Its handling was praised by the pilot and news of the aircraft reached Stalin, who allowed
it to be flown in the May Day flyover.
Though in its current unarmed state, the prototype was little more than a high-power racing aircraft,
totally incapable of flying any military mission, it so impressed Stalin that the General Secretary
called for it to be modified as a fast bomber and put into immediate production as the BB-22.
It was sent to the VVS for state testing, and this promptly put their test pilots and
engineers into a bit of an awkward situation.
Stalin had little interest in the actual details of aircraft design, but he considered this
new plane the best thing in the sky, and it was difficult for test staff to explain that
to turn the aircraft into a useful plane for the VVS, they would have to re-design almost
all of it.
The high performance had been achieved by making a streamlined and beautiful aircraft,
something that could not be achieved in a militarised version that would have guns,
bomb racks and defensive armour bolted onto it.
The aircraft would also be highly impractical to transport due to the wing being made in
one piece, which made it impossible to move by rail.
Following further tests, it was also found that the aircraft’s original climb rate
had been…misrepresented.
The time to climb to 7000 meters had been given as 8.7 minutes, but in practice it was
33 minutes as the engines were always overheating and the aircraft had to repeatedly level out
to let them cool.
The VVS quickly recognised the 22 was not a military machine, however on the 20th June
1939 resolution 171 was passed, ordering it into production anyway.
At the same time Vladimir Petlyakov had created aircraft No.100 – a predecessor to the PE-2
– which met the same requirements without the myriad of problems faced by Yakovlev’s
design.
They key factor in this situation was Stalin’s approval of Yakovlev, who unlike his rival,
wasn’t sitting in an NKVD prison cell.
In May Yakovlev’s team built a mock-up of the BB-22, and in June the VVS commission
made its initial report.
It called for the BB-22 to carry a bomb load of 400-700kg and have a rear defensive gun.
It also asked Yakovlev to rectify seventy-two listed defects, and to present the modified
aircraft for state trials on the 1s of August.
Yakovlev addressed some of the more serious of these defects, but most of them he ignored,
and he never actually resubmitted the prototype…instead he just had 3,300 of the original drawings
photocopied to speed things along, and the aircraft went into production in September.
The first production version retained most of the original airframe, with the exception
of a redesigned central fuselage that incorporated a bomb bay to carry four FAB-1000 bombs.
A fixed machine gun was installed in the nose, and the navigator was given a similar gun
in a pivoting mount.
Other modification included repeated revisions of the engine cooling system and the fitting
of new propellers.
The first aircraft rolled out from factory No.1 on New Years eve 1939, but arguments
over the build standard delayed the first flight until the 20th of February.
Having realised that Yakovlev had deceived them, VVS staff repeatedly demanded that the
defects listed in their report should still be corrected – however factory staff followed
Yakovlev’s instructions and built the planes to the design he submitted.
That same month the commission recommended that the original production order of 50 aircraft
be limited to 10 examples, all of which were delivered for testing by mid-February.
Around this time the service designation was changed from BB-22 to Yak-2, under a new scheme
to honour aircraft designers.
Further changes were now made, the biggest being yet another redesign of the central
fuselage.
Now the navigator was moved right behind the pilot and the bomb bay was now behind the
rear spar.
The main advantage of this change was that the rear canopy could be raised up on a hydraulic
jack that could offer the navigator’s gun a superior field of fire.
All manner of problems continued to plague the Yak-2 during its production.
A VVS report bluntly stated that Yak-2s built at Factory no.1 were deemed ‘unsatisfactory’.
There were problems with the engines overheating and maintaining power, there were instances
of tail flutter, unreliability of the hydraulic systems, and most worrying was the tendency
for the bolts securing the engines to fracture and break.
The final VVS report showed that not only had performance sharply deteriorated but the
number of uncorrected faults had grown to 183, and calls began to grow for production
to be stopped.
After a VVS test pilot spoke out about the problems, Stalin ordered an investigation.
Yakovlev promptly shifted all the blame onto Factory No.1 and production was transferred
to Factory 81.
The director of the factory tried to offload responsibility of the existing Yaks to the
VVS but to no avail.
A factory 1 batch of twenty-five Yak-2s were supposedly so defective that they were unflyable.
Factory 81 did its best to rectify the more obvious problems, and overall quality improved,
but the Yaks never reached a standard acceptable to the VVS despite production reaching over
100 units.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, many of the Yaks were destroyed on the ground
– which considering their history was probably for the best, and there was one unfortunate
incident of friendly fire when an I-15 shot down a Yak-2 – the aircraft being a somewhat
uncommon sight in the sky itself.
The aircrafts biggest contribution would be to serve as an example of how political favouritism
can breed disaster in the world of aircraft design.
Aside from the production version, two other prototypes were explored.
The R-12 was a reconnaissance version of the Yak-2, and had been included in the original
1939 design program.
A single model was built and completed in June 1940, but Yakovlev didn’t submit the
aircraft for state testing due to the growing list of problems with the other model.
An added problem was that poor design of the wire antenna limited the radio to only half
its wavebands.
The Yak-2KABB, which is the model featured in War Thunder.
Was a prototype ground attack aircraft fitted with the KABB-MV gun and bombing installation.
This comprised of a ventral cannon pack and a special glazed nose for bomb aiming equipment.
Few details of this aircraft survive as all prototype work was halted after the German
invasion.
Attempts to rectify the faults of the Yak-2 would lead to the development of the Yak-4,
also known as the B22-Bis.
The main difference was the installation of M-105 engines, each rated at 1050hp.
The rear fuselage was redesigned and lengthened, and various improvements were made to the
engine mountings, cooling, and fuel systems.
It replaced the Yak-2 in production in November 1940.
Total production of the Yak-4 was about 100, bringing the total number of series aircraft
up to 201.
The final 22 were delivered in April 1941, but crews hardly had time to convert to the
new planes before the war kicked off in June.
Attrition was high, mainly due to enemy attacks on airfields and teething problems with the
new aircraft.
And so, despite what appeared to be a promising start in 1939, Yakovlev’s first foray into
combat aircraft was anything but smooth.
He would of course redeem himself with other designs, but that’s a story for another
day.