Яковлев Як-55: Советский самолёт высшего пилотажа

Soviet aerobatic aircraft

The Yakovlev Yak 55 is a single seat aerobatic aircraft. Pilots flying the Yak 55 have won several world aerobatic championships.

The 1976 World Aerobatic Championship was dominated by Soviet pilots, who finished first and second in the individual competition and also won the team and women's competitions in their Yakovlev Yak 50s. However, the Soviet pilots were also impressed by the performance of competing Western built aircraft, which required less space than the Yak 50 to perform the same manoeuvers. A team in the Yakovlev design bureau, led by Sergei Yakovlev, and with V. P. Kondratiev and D. K. Drach as chief engineers, therefore set out to design an all new dedicated aerobatic aircraft, unrelated to the Yak 50, which would be able to match the tight, low speed style of Western aircraft. The resulting design, the Yakovlev Yak 55, was a single engined all metal cantilever monoplane. The aircraft's wing is mounted midway up the fuselage and is of thick, symmetrical section to aid inverted flight. The pilot sits in an enclosed cockpit under a sliding teardrop canopy level with the trailing edge of the wing and with the seat below wing level. The powerplant is the same tractor configuration Vedeneyev M14P engine driving a two bladed V 530TA D35 propeller, as used by the Yak 50, while the aircraft has a fixed undercarriage with titanium sprung main gear and tailwheel.#tag:ref|Gunston blames the redesign on the need to deal with structural failures of the original wing. with 108 aircraft being delivered by 1991. 106 Yak 55Ms had been built by the end of 1993, with low rate production continuing.