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HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY, OBJECTS AROUND US
Ekranoplan. History of invention and production
Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us Ekranoplan - a dynamic air cushion vessel) is a multi-mode vessel that, in its main operational mode, flies using the "screen effect" over a water or other surface, without constant contact with it, and is supported in the air, mainly by aerodynamic lift generated by on air wing(s), hull or parts thereof which are intended to use the "screen effect" action. Ekranoplans are able to operate on a variety of routes, including those that are inaccessible to conventional ships. Along with higher hydroaerodynamic quality and seaworthiness than other high-speed vessels, ekranoplanes almost always have amphibious properties. In addition to the water surface, they are able to move over a solid surface (ground, snow, ice) and be based on it. The ekranoplan thus combines the best qualities of a ship and an aircraft.
Ekranoplanes capable of taking off from the screen for a long time and switching to "airplane" flight mode are called ekranoplanes. In the 1920s, during testing of aircraft with a wing attached to the lower part of the fuselage (low-wing type), the designers noticed that the wing lift during landing increases slightly and, as a result, the machine continues to fly over the field, as if not wanting to land. This effect even sometimes led to accidents. The center of pressure of the wing (the point of application of the lift force) in this case moves to its trailing edge, and the aircraft may tip over. Further studies have shown that between the wing of the aircraft and the surface of the earth, the air is compressed and becomes denser. So there is an additional lifting force, which supports the device in the air. The discovered phenomenon was called the screen effect. The screen was the surface of the earth or water. In 1922, one of the first works on the screen effect appeared - an article by B.N. Yuryev "Influence of the Earth on the aerodynamic properties of the wing". In the 1930s, V.V. Golubev, Ya.M. Serebrisky, Sh.A. Biyachuev, N.A. Chernomashintsev. In the USSR, they did not limit themselves to theoretical research. The development of an aircraft using the screen effect began. Such machines - later they were called ekranoplanes and ekranoplanes - seemed very profitable. The logic is simple: the lower the flight altitude, the more significant the effect of the screen and, consequently, the higher the carrying capacity of the wing. As a result, an ekranoplan needs engines that are two to three times less powerful than an aircraft of the same carrying capacity. It is enough to equip a rather heavy aircraft with a conventional automobile engine. The well-known aircraft designer and inventor P.I. dreamed of creating an ekranoplan that could fly over the desert and water, snow and ice. Grokhovsky. In 1932, he developed a project for an amphibious ekranoplan with two engines and a completely modern aerodynamic layout. In 1935, the Finnish engineer T. Kaario built the first apparatus for experimental study of the screen effect. Well-known aircraft designers G.P. worked on ekranoplanes. Beriev, R.L. Bartini. But the greatest success was achieved by Rostislav Evgenievich Alekseev, who headed the Central Design Bureau of hydrofoil ships in Nizhny Novgorod. Alekseev is known to people far from the army as the creator of high-speed ships - "Rocket", "Meteor", "Comet". His portrait can be seen in the American Congress in the gallery of the great figures of the world who made the greatest contribution to the development of mankind in the XNUMXth century. “Bartini went to the idea of creating ekranoletov“ from above ”- from aviation, trying to teach airplanes to fly as low as possible,” Stanislav Slavin writes in the World Pathfinder magazine. a few meters above the ground, a linen airplane suddenly began to glide over the grass, as if it was being held in the air by an invisible but powerful hand - this is how the air screen manifested itself. Alekseev, on the other hand, decided to create ekranoplans at the end of the 1950s, when his hydrofoils at speeds of 100-150 kilometers per hour encountered a cavitation barrier - a phenomenon in which water loses the properties of a continuous fluid liquid. The wings of the machine were destroyed from the many hydraulic shocks that fell on them. And so he decided: stop fighting this effect by improving the wing profiles, you need to create qualitatively new ships if you want to rise above the problem of cavitation. The first 3-ton ekranoplan, which appeared in 1961, had a pair of load-bearing wings. But, having studied such a scheme on several models, the designer abandoned it and chose another one - an apparatus with one low aspect ratio wing. Alekseev's knowledge, intuition and confidence were so great that he almost immediately stepped from a five-ton ekranoplan to the construction of a multi-ton machine - the "Caspian Monster". The world's largest ekranoplan KM ("Layout Ship"), with a take-off weight of 540 tons and a maximum flight speed of 500 kilometers per hour, made its first flight in 1966. KM had ten VD-7 turbojet engines with a maximum thrust of 13 tf each.
In the 1970s, it was the largest aircraft in the world. Neither Boeing nor Lockheed dreamed of such air giants at that time. In the USA, Germany, Japan and China, since the 1960s, several light experimental ekranoplanes and ekranoplanes have been designed and built. When the US secret services spotted the tests of the first KM flying ship, they dubbed it the "Caspian Monster". Our designers deciphered two letters mysterious to the Americans casually and simply - in the documentation it was listed as a "dummy ship" and was only one model out of dozens of similar ones. The first serial flying ship, which became part of the Caspian Flotilla, named "Eaglet", was intended for landing operations. "Eaglet" was created in 1979. Its speed is 375 kilometers per hour; range - 200 kilometers. The crew of the ekranoplan is six people, and the payload is forty tons.
And soon its "relative" - "Lun" was also delivered to Kaspiysk, on board of which six "Moskit" medium-range missile systems were placed. When three "Eaglets" cut through the waters of the Caspian Sea and loitered in the air, the CIA and the US military department were seriously concerned. The hunt for the secrets of ekranoplanes by the special services of many countries began. The museum of the Krasnoye Sormovo plant has an exact model of this ekranoplan - this is a gift from a delegation of American military specialists led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Admiral Mikael S. Francis. The Americans visited the test base in 1993. The Russian government agreed to show the top-secret Orlyonok for only two hundred thousand dollars, although it could not help but understand that professional intelligence officers would also be watching the flights. The ekranoplan was photographed, filmed. US military experts bombarded the designers and testers with professional questions. They couldn't hide their surprise. The ship, rushing over the sea at a height of two or three meters and therefore not detected by locators, overtook ordinary aircraft that followed the tests. Meanwhile, those who had more or less solid information about the activities of the Alekseev Design Bureau began to leave poverty and lack of money for Israel and the United States. However, be that as it may, in the prosperous West, nothing similar to domestic developments has yet been created! Meanwhile, in Russia it was considered that the need for missile and amphibious ekranoplanes had disappeared. Two ekranoplanes, mothballed, have been preserved in good condition, and are still standing in Kaspiysk. They can be converted into rescue boats. But there are no funds for this either. Their further fate, apparently, is sad. According to a government decree adopted in the fall of 2000, both Lun and Orlyonok, among other things, the "junk" unnecessary for the army, will be turned into scrap metal, and the modest proceeds will be transferred to the federal budget. Once Rostislav Evgenievich Alekseev said in his hearts to his closest assistants: “Our state system is the main saboteur. A few years ago, Nizhny Novgorod scientists and shipbuilders proposed to conduct a demonstration flight of the Lun ekranoplan around the globe. Such an unusual step would, in their opinion, attract investments to create a fundamentally new type of transport for the entire planet. Most importantly, European banks were also ready to finance the unusual project. However, for unknown reasons, it was rejected. Possibly for privacy reasons. And today, most of the scientific, technical and design solutions remain original and are still expensive. “To see the ekranoplan, I didn’t have to go to Kaspiysk,” writes Trud newspaper journalist V. Dolgogorov. rather solid high-speed vessels for border guards and customs look like toys against its background, and it is not surprising: the top point of the tail section of the ship, where the wheelhouse is located, is at the height of a nine-story building. Once I read a note published in one of the local newspapers: “At the Volga plant, the construction of the ekranoplan“ Rescuer ”is being completed - a unique aircraft designed to help people who find themselves in an extreme situation at sea. Next year it will be tested and after this will take over the watch". This message was printed on July 22, 1995. Since then, work here has not progressed a single step, although the ship-aircraft is in 90 percent readiness. Two hundred million rubles are required to complete the construction of the "Rescuer". Three were allocated for 2000. Moreover, for some reason, the project is financed not by the Russian Emergencies Ministry, but, as before, by the Navy with its cut budget. But after all, not only and not so much it is warships that suffer disasters on the seas and oceans. Civilian ships are killed many times more. By the way, the sad fate of domestic ekranoplanes is largely due to the inconsistency of departmental interests. Ekranoplanes, on the one hand, are like ships, but flying. So - alien children for the Air Force. And for the Navy, they remain aircraft. This is how the miracle ships turned out to be outside the sphere of interest of both. If based in Murmansk, the ekranoplan could come to the rescue in time, for example, to the sailors of the Komsomolets nuclear submarine that died in the Norwegian Sea. And the passengers of the ferry "Estonia", when more than seven hundred people died, could have been helped - it would have flown to the place of the tragedy in just thirty minutes. Vitaly Alekseev, general director of the Volga shipbuilding plant, is the namesake of the general designer of ekranoplanes. In his time, he himself flew many hours on them. Alekseev had many opportunities to make sure that the ekranoplan was completely safe. So, once during the tests, the ekranoplan's feed fell off, but no one was hurt. Another time, when the hydraulics failed during the flight, the ship splashed down without any problems. After the malfunction was eliminated, the ekranoplan continued its flight. The general director of "Volga" has a dream - to create a World Rescue Service, the basis of which could be ekranoplanes. Today, assistance to those in distress in the seas and oceans comes, as a rule, with a great delay. Aircraft can only drop a life raft to the victims. During the tragedy of the Komsomolets submarine, the rafts fell a few dozen meters from those who were still afloat. Alas, not all sailors were able to get to them due to hypothermia. The disadvantage of helicopters is their low capacity. As for rescue boats, they can work effectively within a radius of about fifty miles, and even then if the storm is small. “Ekranoplanes,” writes V. Dolgorovov in his article, “allow us to solve a whole range of problems, they are equipped with everything necessary for this. They have the most sophisticated equipment for finding victims, crew members can deploy seaworthy inflatable boats with outboard motors in five minutes here it's up to XNUMX. And a flying ship can start moving towards the target as early as a quarter of an hour after receiving the order. When drifting, an ekranoplan is not afraid of a hurricane wind with a force of up to 40 meters per second, a wave of five meters high: in this case, it behaves like an ordinary float. Moreover, it is not afraid of a strong wave hitting the side, overturning ordinary ships. Its wings are designed in such a way that they smooth out the wave, and a quiet bay is formed behind the vessel, where they receive the victims. By the way, five hundred people is the number of people with whom the "Rescuer" can take off. He can simply take on board eight hundred people or more, and be in a stormy sea until help arrives. That's what the life support system is for. By the way, it can be used to coordinate the work of other rescue equipment. Initially conceived as a machine of destruction, now it can be successfully used as a technique to save people. It is also important that he does not need airports with their expensive equipment - he can splash down wherever the crew wants. According to Alekseev, to create a World Rescue Service, it is enough to equip ten to fifteen bases for the maintenance and service of ekranoplanes - two for each. But to solve such a problem, joint efforts of the countries interested in this are needed. Now their actions are scattered. Until the mid-1990s, there was no precise classification of these aircraft - ekranoplan or ekranoplan - as they did not require an airworthiness certificate. Such machines were created for experiments and for military purposes; they did not perform commercial and passenger flights. At the end of the XNUMXth century, the Safety Code for Ekranoplanes appeared, approved by the International Maritime Organization (IMO). In accordance with the Code, all devices using the screen effect are divided into three types. Type A - ekranoplan. It even theoretically cannot go beyond the screen effect. Type B - ekranolet. He is able to fly beyond the limits of the screen effect and even briefly climb to a limited height. Type C - ekranolet. It uses the screen effect for takeoff and landing only. For the first time in the world, the airworthiness certificate was received by the Amfistar ekranoplan (type A), created in Nizhny Novgorod under the direction of D.N. Sinitsyn. "Amfistar" is equipped with a car engine, has an automatic system for maintaining a given flight altitude. In 1998, the ekranolet (type B) "Ivolga-2" (chief designer V.V. Kolganov) was successfully tested in Moscow. Author: Musskiy S.A.
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