AL-41 Testing continues in Russia

Source: 08.10.02, RTR-Vesti

Fifth Generation Fighters Receive Worthy “Heart”

Tests of a unique engine for the fifth generation fighter have started in Russia. Work is under way at full speed at the largest Russian enterprise, Salyut.

A light hiss, a pop, and with a click of the titanium plates, the engine nozzle moves to the left. Another pop – to the right, upwards, and then downwards and in a circle. A computer monitors the movement. And it is controlling this seemingly, at first glance, such a simple rotary mechanism. All the world’s leading aviation firms have been trying to get it to work on a real engine for all most 10 years.

A test bench. The last checks – and the special housing in which the new engine is installed in tightly closed. The tests will be monitored further with the aid of a television camera and the computer. The speed of the wind flow in the housing is 120 – 150 kilometers per hour.

Start. The power grows. The thrust is 3 tonnes, 5, 10 and a half. Design regime. Now is the most complex. The jet stream, which is able to tear away an 11-tonne concrete barrier from the place, begins to be deflected. The discharge temperature is over 1,000 degrees. A surge to the right, which imitates a sharp departure of an airplane in an anti-missile maneuver, a surge to the left. The nozzle flaps bend, but the computer finds the needed configuration.

“A fifth generation engine should have increased characteristics,” the MMPP Salyut chief designer, Ehmmanuil Gol’dinskiy, says, “but it should be simple, it should be cheap, plus interchangeable.

In the shops they call the new engine our motor. I comparison with past years, when similar developments and tests were carried out under conditions of special secrecy, where in one shop they didn’t know what they were doing in the other, today everyone in the plant knows about the engine. The result of such openness is startling.

“I think that people feel their significance because they see the fruits of their labor. A good engine has resulted. Work output has increased,” the MMPP Salyut general director, Yuriy Eliseev, thinks.

The new engine has colossal prospects. Being absolutely reliable (serial assemblies are used in the design, which have high mean-time-between-failures), it is able to restore the fighter’s single-engine design. Only the Russian air force has nearly 600 such aircraft in reserve. Installing the new engine on them will bring them at once from the third generation category to the “4 – 5th” generation. India, who already has shown interest in these developments and even let the plant have an experimental airplane, has nearly 700 aircraft.

As of today this engine with the controllable vectored thrust already has been operating nearly 200 hours. It has no analogues in the world. This engine should be routine literally in 2 years.