An Experimental Soviet Tailless Bomber | Kalinin K-12 [Aircraft Overview #52]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 พ.ค. 2022
- Today we're looking at the Kalinin K-12, an experimental tailless bomber. Its future was cut short when Konstantin Kalinin, its designer, met his untimely end. Though the experimental bomber was somewhat unstable and not large enough to be practical, it did at least prove that the concept of large tailless aircraft could work.
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Producing these videos is a hobby of mine - and apparently its now a full-time job too! I have a passion for history, and personally own a large collection of books, journals and other texts, and endeavor to do as much research as possible. However if there are any mistakes, please don't hesitate to reach out and correct anything :)
Sources:
Rose.B (2010). Secret Projects - Flying Wings and Tailles Aircraft
Flying Review International. Vol 22 # 5 (Jan 1967) - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![King Of The Skies In The Spanish Civil War | Fiat Cr.32 [Aircraft Overview #90]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/F25fZS4GpoA/mqdefault.jpg)
My voice was still slightly broken for this one 😅
F.A.Q Section
Q: Do you take aircraft requests?
A: I have a list of aircraft I plan to cover, but feel free to add to it with suggestions:)
Q: Why do you use imperial measurements for some videos, and metric for others?
A: I do this based on country of manufacture. Imperial measurements for Britain and the U.S, metric for the rest of the world, but I include text in my videos that convert it for both.
Q: Will you include video footage in your videos, or just photos?
A: Video footage is very expensive to licence, if I can find footage in the public domain I will try to use it, but a lot of it is hoarded by licencing studies (British Pathe, Periscope films etc). In the future I may be able to afford clips :)
Q: Why do you sometimes feature images/screenshots from flight simulators?
A: Sometimes there are not a lot of photos available for certain aircraft, so I substitute this with digital images that are as accurate as possible.
Feel free to leave you questions below - I may not be able to answer all of them, but I will keep my eyes open :)
One aircraft you can add to the suggestion list is the Miles M.30 although there might not be enough material available to make a video on it.
Keep up the good work. ^^
@@teaandmedals oh my god that plane is so ugly
i love it xD
@@teaandmedals I am absolutely planning to cover this, there are some photos of it, but not a huge amount, so I may have to use some artistic drawing as well lol.
I'd love to see a breakdown of the Kikka, the Japanese Jet fighter that looked like the Me 262, or the Tupolev TU-4
Horten Ho 229 ? (I love flying wings)
"The engine wasnt avaliable at the time" litteraly every prototype plane ever
A tale old as time.
@@scalltydemon6264 Well, as old as flight at least.
Right up there the engine failing to deliver the power it was supposed to (or frequently any power at all)…
Seriously
And when delivered, underpowered. Like the Cutlass.
This aircraft honestly looks like something you would see in a Crimson Skies game, I really dig the overall look of it. 😃
Haha that was the shit.... awesome game airship docking fighting ship to ship
Now there's game I'd love to see remade with modern graphics and all.
Or Command and Conquer: Red Alert game
We need a crimson skies definitive Edition.
Oh man! I wish Crimson Skies for PC would be re-released with a far greater draw distance... also, updated textures would be nice.
"...and so ends the story of the Kalinin K-12. And of the Kalinin design bureau. And of the designer Kalinin himself." It's amazing to think of all that might have been if not for political rivalries plahying a role in aircraft design in the 1930s & 1940s... especially in the USSR.
True. But his project had no chances from the start. It was all about access to manufacturing. There were only three large, mass-production plants. Until 1938 their capacity was split between Polikarpov, Ilyushin and Tupolev designs. In 1938, the party bonzas began a private war for the control of these plants, pushing their protegees to replace the big three... There was no place for "independent" designers.
The West: We don't like you or your aircraft design. You're fired."
The USSR "We don't like you or your aircraft design. Fire!"
One bullet is less expensive than a long-term retirement plan with vodka.
I still wonder what kind of pact with the Devil Yakovlev had made. I mean, his original patron,, Rykov was one of the first victims of the purges, then he got involved with the whole I-Z thing (Apart from "let's put a 75 mm recoilless autocannons on a 1930s fighter, four of them" doomed insanity, it was a Tukhachevsky pet project) The designer of the cannon died in gulag, Yakovlev got _promoted._ Stalin dies. He's even more lauded under the new management... Seriously, it's _extremely_ strange, all things considered.
@@nebufabu There is a strangely similar, parallel story of Boris Iofan (1891-1976). He was Rykov's protege from day one, a client of Yenukidze... who received the most important architectural commission of Stalin period. It was as insane as Tukhachevsky's fantasies, and It failed, but Iofan safely survived all his sponsors. The trail of "incidental" deaths around Iofan is not as evident as in Yakovlev's case, but it is certainly there.
Dear god. Designing a novel aircraft must be a strain under normal circumstances. But when the price of failure is literal death... it's a wonder anyone dared try anything outside of the box.
That´s the reason Sikorsky left and went for the USA, becoming the founder of a helicopter creation company with a heritage that lives on even today.
@@sim.frischh9781 I always wondered about that...makes sense!
Stalin was just a nut job.
@@wideyxyz2271 - Stalin made hinself the smartest guy in the room, by murdering noted intellectuals.
@@wideyxyz2271 Stalin was paranoid about people more intelligent then himself. Especially aviation engineers which some have speculated is from an innate fear of flying he had. But it also extended to many others. He would have had Zhukov killed if he could have but has to settle on slandering him with charges of a coup in 1946 and sending him to remote military positions.
This is some Crimson Skies shit right here.
You are showing your age there sir! I Rember that game from about a 100 years ago!
Dr Fasenbender? or was it Fasbender?
A nice story I hadn’t heard before; thank you! On a minor technical point, in aircraft design ‘slats’ are aerodynamic surfaces that extend in front of the leading edge to keep air flowing over the top surface of the wing at low speed and high AoA. When an aircraft has a variety of things hanging off the trailing edge I’d just call them ‘control surfaces’.
Devices meant to alter the lift coefficient of a wing, mounted on the trailing edge, are "flaps"; the leading edge, "slats". "Control surfaces" are not used to alter lift coefficient, deliberately, and as such should not be referred to in this way.
@@35mmShowdown thank you, saved me the effort
@@35mmShowdown Mostly true, but for tailless aircraft the trailing edge surfaces can be dual-purposed as ailerons, elevators and flaps. In this case I don’t know how this was done but ‘control surfaces’ seems like a reasonable cover-all😊
I can't help but think that the rear gun position could have had a, potentially, huge arc of fire including the ability to shoot straight down. Interesting!
Seems to me that this is the only valid reason to have gone down the tail-less path at least back in the 30s. Apparently, Uncle Joe did not find it to be a good enough reason, so pop-pop-pop.
A conventional twin-rudder plane like the Lancaster can do it just as well.
Rex uploaded, I am present.
The goofy part is if you are going to have a fuselage extending out back, you might as well put tail surfaces back there, with a longer moment arm, instead of making trailing edge surfaces provide much more short coupled trim and control forces.
@Cancer McAids The Mitchell Wing ultralight does that, using Junkers elevons at the outer wing panels. My main point is that flying wings still have trim drag just like normal airplanes, the need for downforce somewhere aft to trim to a positive AOA not having gone away, and it can be substantial when so short coupled. It's really only worth doing when it lets you avoid any fuselage extending aft.
This plane looks like a death trap. One engine quits in flight, it's all done. Even a crosswind landing would have been a serious challenge. Given its poor performance, would a traditional empennage have made that much of a difference? The added stability would have more than made up for the loss in speed.
That being said, the DB-3 is one of the most beautiful aircraft aver produced.
Tailless aircraft can be yaw stable, if they are built with wing sweep.
At a yaw angle, the advancing wing presents more surface area to the airstream than the retreating wing, causing a momentum back to neutral.
This might have been the cause for the thick wings, more resistance, more stability margin.
Certified hash brown moment.
Thanks for the vid and thanks for not playing "music" in the background. As a german guy I need full attention to follow the spoken words. Very interesting and I am astonished that there are some designs I have never heard of though I do know something about airplanes.
It flew, and seems to have flown well, and stabilly. It is kinda sad that this project was killed along with its designer...quite literally. Stalin was a right bastard and idiot.
Russia still hasn't recovered from his purges it seems .
Our bastard, but not idiot.
Stalin was a narcissistic psychopath, just like too many heads of state, including those of today's "democratic" western countries.
Good to see that Russian leaders have improved so much in the following 70 years ...
@@fucktochik smart people can be idiots
Your research, editing & production of mostly unknown aircraft is sincerely appreciated!
K.A. Kalinin was arrested for the first time by the NKVD on 1 April 1938. This came about due to a confusing mess involving the failure and disbandment of the Kharkov Aviation Institute (ХИА), of which he had been the Director. He was subsequently thrown out of the Communist Party and reduced in rank at Factory No 18 to common draughtsman. Kalinin petitioned long and hard to be reinstated, both professionally and politically. He was subsequently denounced by three other colleagues at the plant for "acts of sabotage" and was arrested again on 22 October. He was shot "on or approximately" that date, and his reputation was subsequently rehabilitated by the Party in 1957.
"Congratulations! You've just been appointed chief designer!"
"Thanks! Um...who are those guys with rifles?"
"Oh, that's your firing squad."
The quality assurance department, if you will.
😂I'm dying
@@RexsHangar not yet. That's after the trial.
@@TheRealNormanBates trial?
Great video Rex, very informative. Thanks for posting
Thank you again; a great choice of subject.
All kinds of craziness in a plane I’d never heard of before. Excellent job Rex! Suggestion: Vickers Wellesley?
Love your work buddy. Thanks, from Melbourne, Australia.
Great work Sir thank you
Thanks for another interesting video
Great job 👏
very interesting and well made video
Ok. I'm impressed. I've never heard of this plane. I like your channel
I just stumbled upon your page and have never heard of this plane before. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about aviation history. Good work!
I've found that there is always one more I didn't know about.
Wow! Thank you for interesting plane)
great video
Fascinating.
Many were enticed by the lure of the low drag of the flying wing. No one could get the short lever arms among the CG, center of pressure, and control surfaces to fully control an aircraft. Too bad Jack Northrup died before Northrup Grumman's B2 finally proved a flying wing could work in service once computers were added to manage the control surfaces and the ailerons and flaps split for yaw ( drag).
The vid said the small version of Kaliinin's design had a 100 flights. Musta been controllable.
They did let northrop see it before he died. Figured he probably didn't have long to compromise the project anyway
Didn’t the Luftwaffe have a couple of flying wings back in the 40s?
@@keithmccormack6248 they had gliders, and the Horton Brothers insisted they could eventually be jet powered. Everybody ran into the same problem. Without a computer to handle stability, pilots couldn't keep up with all the necessary trim and adjustments.
@@mikehimes7944 The Horten 229 versions 2 & 3 flying wings flew under jet power in 1944.
This makes a cool space ship design
A great video as usual! Perhaps sometime you could do a video about about the He-100?
new subber hier
love the voice
and how you present the information
3:27 "..., but treat that with a pinch of salt, as I could only find one particular source, that claimed that."
The mark of a true researcher!
If you continue such diligent attention to source material, your channel will grow very rapidly.
It's amazing that an unconventional design like this made it to flight testing. I wonder if any of the test pilots lived long enough to appreciate how unique their experience was.
That Dan Gryder guy is already blaming the pilot.
Have a happy safe vacation! Sorry holiday. Oh wait, this video is four months old. Oh well, glad you're back. Hope you had fun!
very cool
Extremely high quality, I'm still amazed! Please take a look at the Romanian I.A.R. 81 please!
Interesting tale .
Nice
You have an enviable talent for finding aircraft I've never heard of.
These are great videos, BTW. Your channel is quickly becoming one of my faves.
Keep these vids on innovative/insane (tom-A-to/Tom-AH-to) coming!
If that thing lost an engine I suspect it would quickly go into a flat spin.
It is Kaleenin... Stress on the first of the i's.
The airfield in Moscow was not “Toshíno” but Toúshino. That airfield was built-up completely by the Sparták (currently Otkrýtie Arena) stadium in 2015-2017, and residential complexes that are still being built in 2022, the last plane taking off (illegally) was a private and privately restored IL-14T, one of three actually (but not legally) airworthy IL-14s in Russia as of 2022, two of those, together with other historical aircraft that include two of three airworthy Russian DC-3s and many other interesting machines (and Mansur, the aviation pet bear), are kept at Oréshkovo airfield near the town of Vorotýnsk in Kalúga region, to the south of Moscow.
The same fate of being built up was shared earlier by the first ever Moscow airfield, later civilian airport and then test airfield, Khodýnka (the only remaining memories of aviation in the area are the relevant authorities and companies offices in the vicinity, and some toponyms, including the 1938 metro station Aeroport of Line 2).
hello great presentation, thanks for sharing this with us, holy the man got executed. saludos
Finally! The *original* Cloakshape fighter!
Just a comment: approval during these times, was that you remain enclosed in a base somewhere in deep Russia for some months, and once you have succeeded, you can visit again your family. This approach to design created beautiful projects with many types of errors, since human beings need social contact in order to generate successful creation. The aircrafts during that time were not exception.
first time I hear about a tailless project plane that doesn't end up by a crash.
Bizarre. Never heard of it.
Yet another nail in the coffin on the assumption that the B2 must be based on the Ho-229 because flying wing.
This is on the wackier side of flying wings, though. Surprised it was stable.
You can thank the NKVD for that
hello rex 😁
There's some strong evidence to show that Stalin was terrified of flying; his only two flights being to and from Yalta, for the meeting of the Big 3; during both it was said that he was near panic at the back of the plane. One of the Soviet state film makers made a movie about the heroic struggle to liberate Germany and a whole scene had Stalin arriving in Berlin by plane, complete fabrication. He never flew again, and he never went to Berlin. It was rather strange how many top men in the development of the Soviet air force were killed or imprisoned during the Purges, a surprisingly large number. Even though the Red Air Force made a large number of advancements during the war, Soviet air power development really only took off after Stalin died.
A number of different books I've read on the subject chalk it up to his paranoia of assassination, either from foreign agents or especially from political enemies in the country.
Smuggle even a fairly small bomb on board, and the death of all passengers aboard would be virtually guaranteed. Less so with his preferred method of transport (a giant, heavily armed, and jealously guarded armored train), where if there were any major problems he could at least get off and run away.
Man neat plane
You're successful and your rivals ax you, you're not and the boss does. Either way, it was so much stress he forgot to put a tail on 😵
That top view of the blueprint heavily reminds me of a star wars fighter (ARC-170)
Is that the back or the front?
Yes!
I swear all aircraft designers were taking vast amounts of *"Acid"* back in the day! 😄
When you can be shoot by any mistake, plane like this is the real brave advantage
They sometimes say that an industry is cutthroat. In this case it may not be cutthroat but it does keep the firing squad busy.
In many ways the Soviets were very much one of if not the leader in the aviation at this time. But as so often happens politician have to mess things up.
Indeed. I always was impressed with the designs the Soviets came up with in the 30s. One can wonder, how much more well equipped the VVS would have been at the start of the war, if Stalin's purges didn't happened.
@@magoid yes indeed.
Crazy lack of yaw damping moment! Combined with a twin engine layout like that it was a disaster waiting to happen.
By this point in time it should have been very clear how important stability in yaw is for a flying wing, and this just didn't have it!
And there I thought my job was hard, at least there's no firing squads waiting for me at handover 😅
yet.
Reminds me a little of the Canberra
Its an efficient design re total drag, but the BIG problem is an EXTREMELY RESTRICTED Center of Gravity range. Out of that range and control is lost. I built a similar RC straight slab wing, and it flew fine.
hey some of those concept sketches look like that gunship from "nausica and the valley of the wind"
the way I first heard it, the K-12 had numerous (unspecified) design issues that Kalinin failed to overcome, and that was when Stalin had him shot. the misappropriation of funds story actually makes more sense.
Now i know what inspired the Klingon bird of prey 😂
I think I just found a new channel to subscribe to
Most tailless designs have wing sweep, at least, if not more elaborations. This looks as though you just get the front end of a conventional twin, with some big endplates at the wingtips. Did Kalinin have some special tricks that aren't visible in photographs?
Cool.......
Another dark corner of history placed in the light .
In the rest of the world, you terminate the project, in soviet russia, the project terminates YOU!
"Its future was cut short" nice pun i like it lool
It looked like it might have been viable with more powerful engines and some aerodynamic refinement. That tail turret must have had the widest range of fire of any that were tried and tested during WWII and the years leading up to it! I would love a 1/48 model of this beast. A kit of the He111z (!) was released, and that asymmetrical Blohm und Voss reconnaissance aircraft, so ...?
MikroMir, a Russian brand makes the K12 or made it in 1:72 and the K7 too!! You can check on Scalemate database
th-cam.com/video/976AoYB8n_o/w-d-xo.html
This is definitely something for Mikro-Mir, they already did a kit of the K-7.
F4U Corsair next please
I really really really doubt that design could counter a flat spin. Like with most prototypes discussed in these videos, I would love it if someone would run a virtual simulation on it, see what its potential was.
It looks like a mid-level boss in a Capcom overhead shooter game.
I'm not an aircraft aerodynamic engineer. Yet, even I can see this thing was an accident waiting to happen...!
People were nuts in the interwar years. Nuts in the good ways.
Now everyone is even nuttier, but in the bad ways.
For all the good the internet brought, it also came with bad. Namely the massive rise in degeneracy.
I might have missed this (the washing machine was beeping!), but what are the benefits of a tailess flying wing?
Making 10 planes of your barely passable design when the factory was specifically ordered to build DB-3 was a very questionable decision to say the least. Even in USA Kalinin would've been sued into poverty for that.
Also, fun fact: in one of the test flights of the downsized model a lever for pitch control surface broke and the plane nose-dived so violently that it threw the pilot out. Fortunately the pilot landed with a parachute and even the model somehow stabilised, descended in spiral and landed without a pilot.
Does anybody have an idea why thad design had enough yaw stability to fly? There seems to be not enough vertical surface behind where I suspect the center of gravity should be. It also does not seem to be a "true" flying wing like the ones Northrop and Horten had developed. To me this wing looks like it needs a vertical stabilizer.
The vertical surfaces on the wingtips don't appear to be to far enough to the aft to act as yaw stabilizers.
I suspect it had yaw stability exactly because it wasn't a "true" flying wing. The body was acting as vertical stabilizer.
Soviet Union was ahead of its time when it came to planes....mostly overlooked by the west!
This looks like something you would see in *Nausicaa* or any number of Miyazaki films.
50,000 subscribers.
Plus 10% more, in only a few weeks!
fits the definition of a 'flying wing'.
To call it tailless is misleading, since the vertical tail stabilizer was just moved to the wing tipds.
I love "suspiciously normal"
It occurs to me that bats, unlike birds, do not really use tails to fly. They do, however, have dynamic camber and planform which they have developed over 50 million years. While not as efficient as birds in cruising flight, they do seem to expend less energy in manoeuvring flight. Of course, this sort of dynamic wing change would have been out of the question for Kalinin, and possibly still is.
Was the K-7 at a point also a tailless model? Especially after the tiny booms broke off in flight.
Nice one. Never new the word eventuated ...err was a word..😂👍. Should have said . Pinch of Siberian ..salt 💡🙀 imo
How close is this design to the Horton flying wing ?? hmmmm, not much.
The normal happy for members of State Security story of Soviet design endeavour.
So do you have any idea what was up with that paint scheme?
Experimental aircraft starter pack:
- Tight budget
- less powerful engine than blueprints planned
- at the very least 1 crash or crash landing
- a concept so ahead of it’s time it actually inhibits the potential of the aircraft
- Rex’s hangar video about said aircraft
For a non specialist, the length of the propeller blades looks ridiculous compared to the thickness of the wing's leading edge. This is even more striking in the drawing at 9:03. This doesn't seem to be a problem since such aircraft have flown. EDIT : i guess it's related with the speed of the blades' tips
Not surprisingly, something like this would function exactly the same as if you shot off the rear fuselage of a conventional bomber.
Almost as cool as the DB-LK
I noticed the wing cord on this aircraft , and the British experimental plane shown at the beginning. Both have a very thick wing cord. Why is this, can anyone tell me please ?
Thick wings (from top to bottom) or wide wings (from front to back)? Thicker wings generally produce more lift….
What's up with the discord server? I can't see anything in it