Yakovlev Yak-55
Russian single-seat aerobatic aircraft
The Yakovlev Yak-55 is a single-seat aerobatic aircraft. Pilots flying the Yak-55 have won several world aerobatic championships.
Development
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 360 horsepower (270 kW) 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.
The prototype Yak-55 first flew in May 1981, was unveiled at the Moscow Tushino air show in August 1982 and displayed (but did not compete) at the 1982 World Aerobatic Championships.
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