Air-Cushion Aircraft Developed Through Individual Initiative
The aircraft plunged into the smooth water surface of Lake Lunskoye almost without a splash, and then the tail and outstretched wings, like giant floats, appeared above the surface... Someone then felt that if a mark were to be given to that "dive," it would get the highest! True, the nose portion of the fuselage was deformed from the impact. That occurred on 3 Aug 90. O. Cheremukhin, the hero of the episode described, getting out of the hospital in two weeks, was occupied first and foremost with an analysis of what had happened, since both the flight and the fall of the aircraft had been captured on videotape. It was necessary to answer the main question—who was to blame for the fall, the aircraft or the pilot?
Oleg Aleksandrovich, studying the behavior of the craft in the air with stopwatch in hand, came to the unequivocal conclusion that he himself was to blame for the crash—he had made several gross errors in piloting, as the result of which there was not enough engine thrust and the aircraft had lost speed and dropped. The design elicited no doubts overall. A collective of enthusiasts that included, aside from the chief designer (the pilot), his close assistants and like thinkers Andrey Chistyakov, Aleksandr Rakov and others, set about the restoration work. Just who were they, where and as what were they working, what possessed them in their quest? These were people that were devoted first and foremost to the skies...
It is generally recognized that design forecasting in aviation today can proceed in three directions, founded on a new idea, new materials and new assemblies. The novelty in this case was the idea itself. The Poisk-01A aircraft, after all, was an original phenomenon in the domestic practice of aircraft construction, distinguished first and foremost by the air-cushion landing gear, providing for its operation from diverse, unprepared sites. The task of the creative research was to check out the stability, controllability and external loads in takeoff and landing for the purpose of ascertaining the limits of restrictions. That is what the official document says.
The new member of the aircraft family—or more precisely, the experimental prototype of it—is being created in Nizhniy Novgorod at the Aviation Production Association imeni S. Ordzhonikidze.
The history of the Poisk is unfortunately a better illustration of the last decade of stagnation and restructuring, since more than ten years, after all, have passed since the birth of the idea to its practical incarnation. Those years have had everything—hope and disappointment, enthusiasm and hopelessness, triumph and failure. One can only tip one's hat to the doggedness with which the collective of like thinkers has surmounted the obstacles that arose on its path.
The author of the project, Oleg Aleksandrovich Cheremukhin, is an uncommon person in aircraft building. His boy's passion for aircraft modeling pre-ordained his later fate. He entered the Kazan Aviation Institute after secondary school, and was sent in placement to one of the leading KBs [design bureaus]. Here, in the process of working on air-cushion craft, the idea arose in him, seeming foolhardy to many of the venerable engineers, of combining what at first glance could not be combined. "That cannot be!" one of them declared. "An imbalance of the whole design will arise in the retraction of the skirt of the landing gear/platform, and no one has yet been able to solve this problem."
The first aircraft appeared in 1979, a year after the first successful experiment with a model. Cheremukhin manufactured it with the guys from the aircraft modeling club at the Sormovskiy Pioneer Hall.
The first step is always the hardest. Field testing revealed a host of defects. The work to improve the design stretched out to several years. And how could it have been otherwise, when they had to obtain the metal, the plywood, the lumber, canvas and much more themselves, frequently with their own money. They installed an engine from a Buran snowmobile (it provided horizontal thrust) and two five-horsepower engines from Ural power saws, which were placed at the base of the landing gear to create the air cushion on the aircraft. The day of flight testing finally arrived, on 3 Jul 89.
The pilot gained an altitude of 30 meters and came around. But the aircraft did not have enough thrust at a bank angle of more than 30°, which led to a loss of speed and a wing stall. The pilot was fortunately not injured, but the aircraft was sad to see. The only thing that took the edge off the bitterness of the failure was the conclusion of a prestigious committee that "The aircraft is stable in pitch, but the vertical empennage is too small; the thesis is interesting and further research would be expedient." The Poisk-01 A took off for the first time from the water and came back down on 3 Jul 90. The pilot seated in the cockpit could not tell from his own sensations the type of surface. And then, on August 3, came the crash of the aircraft, almost costing its creator his life. The next round of restoration work ensued after that. Reduction gearing that increased the thrust was installed on the engine.
The year flew by without notice. Yet another in a long line of years that lay between the idea that had once flashed and the genuine triumph that occurred in the summer of 1991 at the next review of the craft, this time in Chernigov. As late as a few moments before the takeoff, the skeptics did not believe that this "cart" could fly. Its appearance was too unconventional. It could, as we see, if one
approaches the matter with sober calculation and an irrepressible thirst to attain the goal. "The aircraft is permitted to be operated" was the conclusion of the prestigious commission. It creators, by the way, had been sure of that!
O. Cheremukhin and his group have been working at the firm of TRANSAL for more than a year now, occupied at their own production association with the design engineering and manufacture of experimental prototypes of aircraft for the 21st century. A four-seat air-cushion aircraft is being developed based on the Poisk-01 A—a dream of geologists, forest workers, shepherds, reindeer breeders and petroleum workers...
