![]() Ultimately, the military relied on more conventional aircraft for the job,” says Sovenko.Īfter it was retired, the original prototype was transferred by barge from Taganrog in southern Russia, where it had been built and tested, to a small town near Moscow, Lytkarino. It could only carry a very small number of missiles and the technical challenges of creating such an unusual vehicle were very large. “I think the Soviet military very quickly realized that the effectiveness of the VVA-14 as an anti-submarine aircraft would have been low. The resulting tests, performed just after Bartini’s death, informed the development of other such aircraft, making the USSR the undisputed leader in the field.ĭespite this coda, however, the project was out of steam. This doomed the project, and the aircraft was disassembled.īartini tried to pump new life into the VVA-14 by turning into an ekranoplan, a type of aircraft that uses ground effect to glide close to a surface like water at high speed like a hovercraft does. The second prototype was supposed to receive the engines for vertical take off, but they were never fitted to the almost completed plane, because a suitable engine type was never developed. The Soviet military abandoned the project after they realized its effectiveness would be limited. “When looking at it from the ground, the VVA-14 caused understandable associations with Zmei Gorynych: she also had, as it were, three heads, as well as relatively small wings,” said Sovenko. The odd looks earned it the nickname Zmei Gorynich, after a dragon from Russian folk tales. In total, from 1972 to 1975, it performed 107 flights with over 103 flight hours,” says Sovenko. It was intended only for studying the characteristics of horizontal flight and testing the aircraft systems. “This aircraft did not have lifting engines or any equipment for searching for submarines. It was later fitted with the pontoons and tested afloat. ![]() The first prototype took to the air in 1972. However, he became famous mainly for his ideas and concepts, and only a few of those actually became reality,” says Sovenko.īartini, who left his home in Italy for the Soviet Union in 1923 after the rise of the Fascists, had envisaged several different versions of the VVA-14, including one with inflatable pontoons to land on water and another with folding wings that could be operated from ships at sea. ![]() Without a doubt, Bartini has left a mark in Soviet aircraft building. It seemed that he was not from his time, but from some other era – someone even called him an alien. “According to Pogorelov, Bartini was a visionary who had an unusual mind and character. In 2005, Sovenko met Nikolai Pogorelov, the deputy of Robert Bartini during the design phase of the plane. “The VVA-14 was a flying boat that was supposed to take off from water or land vertically, and then fly like a regular plane at altitude,” says Andrii Sovenko, a Soviet aviation historian. The VVA-14 was desiged to take off vertically from water or land. The aircraft was looted and damaged, and it hasn’t been repaired since. The first, mostly intact, was sent in 1987 to the Central Air Force Museum near Moscow, but something went wrong with the delivery. When Bartini died, in 1974, the project died with him, and the second prototype was dismantled. Only two of the proposed three prototypes were ever built, and only one was ever flown. In the mind of its designer, Robert Bartini, the amphibious VVA-14 would be the perfect machine to seek and destroy the missile-carrying submarines. The United States introduced them in 1961 on its submarine fleet as part of its nuclear deterrent. The Bartini Beriev VVA-14 – the letters are an acronym for “vertical take-off amphibious aircraft” and 14 was the number of engines – was designed to take off from anywhere without a runway and to be capable of sustained flight just above the water surface.ĭesigned in the 1960s, the aircraft was a response to the Polaris ballistic missiles. The only surviving prototype of this unusual plane now sits dilapidated in a field near Moscow, but it was once the hope of the Soviet Union against US submarine attacks.
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