The Ilyushin Il-30 was a

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

turbojet The turbojet is an airbreathing jet engine which is typically used in aircraft. It consists of a gas turbine with a propelling nozzle. The gas turbine has an air inlet which includes inlet guide vanes, a compressor, a combustion chamber, and ...

-powered tactical

bomber A bomber is a military combat aircraft designed to attack ground and naval targets by dropping air-to-ground weaponry (such as bombs), launching aerial torpedo, torpedoes, or deploying air-launched cruise missiles. The first use of bombs dropped ...

designed as a higher-performance,

swept wing A swept wing is a wing that angles either backward or occasionally forward from its root rather than in a straight sideways direction. Swept wings have been flown since the pioneer days of aviation. Wing sweep at high speeds was first investigate ...

version of the

Ilyushin Il-28 The Ilyushin Il-28 (russian: Илью́шин Ил-28; NATO reporting name: Beagle) is a jet aircraft, jet bomber of the immediate postwar period that was originally manufactured for the Soviet Air Forces. It was the Soviet Union's first such ai ...

, in the late 1940s. Its thin wing and engine

nacelle A nacelle ( ) is a "streamlined body, sized according to what it contains", such as an engine, fuel, or equipment on an aircraft. When attached by a pylon entirely outside the airframe, it is sometimes called a pod, in which case it is attached ...

s necessitated the use of

tandem Tandem, or in tandem, is an arrangement in which a team of machines, animals or people are lined up one behind another, all facing in the same direction. The original use of the term in English was in ''tandem harness'', which is used for two ...

landing gear Landing gear is the undercarriage of an aircraft or spacecraft that is used for takeoff or landing. For aircraft it is generally needed for both. It was also formerly called ''alighting gear'' by some manufacturers, such as the Glenn L. Martin ...

, the first Soviet aircraft to do so. It was apparently canceled before the prototype made its first flight, although sources disagree with this.

Development

The Il-30 was a follow-on to the Il-28, although design began on 21 June 1948, before the Il-28 had flown. It was designed to meet a requirement for a jet bomber that could carry to a range of with a maximum speed no less than . The design took that of the Il-28 as a starting point, but had thin, mid-mounted swept wings with a 35° sweep angle, chosen to allow the aircraft to reach its required speed. It was intended to be powered by two new

Lyulka TR-3 The Lyulka TR-3 was a Soviet axial turbojet designed after World War II by Arkhip Mikhailovich Lyulka. Development The Lyulka TR-3 was a single-shaft turbojet with a seven-stage axial compressor. It had an annular combustion chamber with 24 noz ...

axial-flow An axial compressor is a gas compressor that can continuously pressurize gases. It is a rotating, airfoil-based compressor in which the gas or working fluid principally flows parallel to the axis of rotation, or axially. This differs from other ...

engines with 45.1 kN (10,140 lbf) thrust each in wing-mounted nacelles. Both the fuselage and the nacelles were

area rule The Whitcomb area rule, named after NACA engineer Richard Whitcomb and also called the transonic area rule, is a design procedure used to reduce an aircraft's drag at transonic speeds which occur between about Mach 0.75 and 1.2. For supersonic ...

d. Thin wings and the 2° anhedral necessary to cure the excessive lateral stability limited the amount of fuel that could be carried and tip tanks were required to meet the range requirement. The slim engine nacelles did not allow the main landing gear to be stowed there as was done in the Il-28. The solution was to house them within the fuselage — the first bicycle landing gear on a

aircraft — with small, twin-wheeled, outriggers mounted underneath the nacelles to stabilize the aircraft on the ground. The aircraft had a crew of four, the pilot, a bombardier, and two gunners. The pilot, bombardier and

dorsal gunner A dorsal gunner, mid-upper gunner or top gunner is an air gunner responsible for operating a gun position or Gun turret, turret located on the upper (dorsal) fuselage, between the aircraft cockpit, cockpit and aircraft tail, tail of some military ai ...

shared one pressurized compartment that was subdivided into (firstly) a bombardier's position in the extensively glazed nose, and (secondly) a combined cockpit and dorsal turret (Il-V-12): the pilot and dorsal gunner were effectively placed back-to-back underneath the canopy. The

tail gunner A tail gunner or rear gunner is a crewman on a military aircraft who functions as a gunner defending against enemy fighter or interceptor attacks from the rear, or "tail", of the plane. The tail gunner operates a flexible machine gun or aut ...

had a separate, pressurized turret (Il-K6) at the rear of the aircraft. Defensive armament was six

Nudelman-Rikhter NR-23 The Nudelman-Richter NR-23 is a Soviet autocannon widely used in military aircraft of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. It was designed by A. E. Nudelman and A. A. Richter to replace the wartime Nudelman-Suranov NS-23 and Volkov-Yartsev VYa-23, ...

cannon: two fixed firing forward and one pair in each turret. Maximum bomb load was Gordon, pp. 145–46 The initial results were favorable, and a full-scale mockup was formally reviewed in March 1949. The prototype was completed by August 1949, but an incident involving the rival swept-wing

Tupolev Tu-82 The Tupolev Tu-82 was a 1940s Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nomina ...

that broke an engine mount during a low-altitude flight led to delays as additional tests were demanded to determine the strength of the wings before the first flight was made. By the following year, the Il-30 program had lost momentum as the Ilyushin

OKB OKB is a transliteration of the Russian initials of "" – , meaning 'experiment and design bureau'. During the Soviet era, OKBs were closed institutions working on design and prototyping of advanced technology, usually for military applications. ...

was ordered to concentrate its resources on facilitating the service introduction of the Il-28. The Il-30 program was formally terminated by government order on 20 August 1950, and the prototype was eventually scrapped at the beginning of the 1960s.Gordon, p. 146 Aviation historian

Bill Gunston Bill Gunston (1 March 1927 – 1 June 2013) was a British aviation and military author. He flew with Britain's Royal Air Force from 1945 to 1948, and after pilot training became a flying instructor. He spent most of his adult life doing research ...

quotes a

maiden flight The maiden flight, also known as first flight, of an aircraft is the first occasion on which it leaves the ground under its own power. The same term is also used for the first launch of rockets. The maiden flight of a new aircraft type is alwa ...

date of 9 September 1949, but Vaclav Nemecek says 1951.Nemecek, p. 178 Although the Il-30 never actually flew, it was the subject of much (misinformed) speculation in the West. Some of the common misconceptions were that it had a ventral gun mount and that it was the first Soviet bomber to attain the speed of .

Specifications (estimated)

References

Citations

Bibliography

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External links