Notes of an Aircraft Designer

📖 The Scoop

This is the frank and engaging autobiography of one of the Soviet Union's most successful aircraft designers. Yakovlev is best known for his piston-engined fighters, his sports planes, some early Soviet helicopters, and the first Soviet all-weather jet fighter. The book includes his interesting, and caustic, impressions of the aircraft industries of Western Europe, which Yakovlev visited in the late thirties. Alexander S. Yakovlev was one of the most versatile aircraft designers of his age, but he had the misfortune to work in the USSR, which made him almost unknown to the outside world. In 1926-27 he built his first aeroplane, the AIR-1, and from then on he consistently designed structures which were years ahead of their time. Yakovlev died in 1989, and today his design bureau, still on the site of the old bed factory, is the giant Yak Aircraft Corporation. It produces the most important Russian twinjet airliner, a diverse group of general aviation aircraft, an advanced jet trainer and light attack aircraft and, in conjunction with the Museum of Flying in California, replicas of the Yak-3 wartime fighter. The Yakovlev Design Bureau has designed aircraft from gliders to jet transports, not to mention vertical take-off fighters and helicopters since before World War II.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / General (fancy, right?)