30-39_Yak-130_eng.qxd
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Yakovlev
Yakovlev
Yakovlev
Piotr Butowski
air force | project
Says Konstantin Popovich: “Over the five years of cooperating with Aermacchi, we had conducted a huge number of flight tests at the excellent testing facility of Aermacchi. The flight test tempo was rather high – 120 missions over six months. The aircraft was fitted with telemetric equipment down-linking telemetry to ground facilities in real time”. In all, the Yak-130D's flight tests included about 450 test flights. 1999 saw the demonstrator undergoing special flight tests at the GLITs State Flight Test Centre in Akhtubinsk, involving military test pilots. The aircraft completed the bulk of its test flights in 2002, and a decision was taken in mid-2004 to mothball it: the demonstrator had done its job. The Yak-130D test programme provided a huge amount of data on how such a configuration influenced the plane's behaviour. The experience gained was used in refining the production aircraft's configuration. In addition, a number of test programmes completed by the demonstrator became unnecessary for the production Yak-130 to undergo. As far back as January 1997, RusAF announced it was going to order a low-rate initial production (LRIP) batch of 10 Yak-130s to be made by the Sokol plant in Nizhny Novgorod.
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Italian Divorce Starting from a certain stage of the programme, Yakovlev and Aermacchi had strived to develop a common aircraft. However, the requirements of the Russian Air Force and Aermacchi were different in principle, with RusAF rejecting an aircraft comprising foreign-made components and Italians rejecting components made in CIS member countries. Hence, a decision to develop common documentation, the so-called baseline model of the aircraft, which would be used by each party to build a national version of the Yak/AEM-130. That suited Yakovlev though some rights for the aircraft had to be relinquished to Aermacchi. However, this earned Yakovlev some money. The programme would have had to be terminated but for the money. This also allowed the Russian government to pay its debt to Italy. The government encouraged Yakovlev developing the Yak-130's Russian version and paid off the debt in rubles without transferring money abroad. This is how the problem of funding the Russian variant of the Yak-130 was resolved. In late 1999, the Russian and Italian programmes went their own ways finally. Based
on the design documentation provided by Yakovlev, Italians began to develop and build their own trainer, M346, with Yakovlev carrying on with developing the Yak-130 combat trainer and its further derivatives for the Russian Air Force. The former partners under the Yak/AEM-130 programme did not terminate their cooperation. The parties agreed to divide markets and cooperate on promoting the Russian and Italian successors to the Yak/AEM-130 on the global market.
Governmental Acquisition The dire straits the Russian economy found itself in after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, coupled with the reform of the Russian Air Force, adjusted the Yak-130 programme's timescale and the demand for trainers. By the late 1990s, RusAF had retained only three flight schools instead of 12. The flying hours totalled by their cadets dropped by an order of magnitude. Due to that, the need for replacing the L-39 fleet (about 650 aircraft) was not as urgent as before, with their expected upgrade allowing an extension of their service life till 2010–15. www.take-off.ru