Name Robert Bartini | Role Designer | |
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Education Polytechnic University of Milan Aircraft designed Bartini Stal-7, Bartini DAR, Beriev Be-1 | ||
Russian amphibious aircraft with vertical takeoff VVA-14 Fire Snake
Robert Ludvigovich Bartini (or Roberto Oros di Bartini) (14 May 1897 – 6 December 1974) was an Italian aircraft designer and scientist. Active mostly in the Soviet Union, he was called Barone Rosso because of his noble descent.
Contents
- Russian amphibious aircraft with vertical takeoff VVA 14 Fire Snake
- Biography
- List of Bartinis aircraft designs
- Influences
- Engineering creativity
- References
Biography
Bartini was born in Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia). He was the son of an unmarried 17-year-old girl. When the natural father of the child, a married man, refused to recognize the baby as his son, the young mother drowned herself. Her aunts and tutors, impoverished aristocrats originally from the city of Miskolc, North-East of Budapest, granted custody of the child to a peasant family.
Besides his family education, he graduated from gymnasium in 1915, was drafted and sent to officers' reserve school located in Besztercebánya (Banská Bystrica in present-day Slovakia). Upon graduation in 1916, Bartini was sent to the Russian-Austrian-Hungarian front where he was captured in June 1916. He attended flying school in 1921 and Politecnico di Milano in 1922. Bartini became a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1921.
After the Fascist takeover in Italy in 1923, he was transferred undercover to the Soviet Union as an aviation engineer. Along with his transfer, he took along all the latest Italian design and avant-garde technology he was able to gather. He occupied several engineering and command positions in the Soviet Air Force and Red Army. He became the head of the department of amphibious experimental aircraft design in 1928. He was the head of the design department of NII GVF (Russian: Zavod Opytno Konstruktorskoye Nauchno-Issledovatel'skiy Institut Grazhdanskovo Vozdushnovo Flota — "Factory for Special Construction at the Scientific Test Institute for the Civil Air Fleet"), general designer (chief designer), since 1930.
He was imprisoned from 1938 to 1946. He continued his work on new aircraft designs as a prisoner in TsKB 29 NKVD and in OKB-86 on the territory of Dimitrov Aircraft Factory and Beriev Aircraft Company in Taganrog (1946–1952), then in the Russian Siberian Aeronautical Research Institute (SibNIA), Novosibirsk. R.L.Bartini was rehabilitated in 1956.
He also published papers concerning aviation construction materials and technology, aerodynamics, dynamics of flight, and even theoretical physics.
He died in Moscow, Russia in 1974.
List of Bartini's aircraft designs
This table of Bartini's designs incorporates information extracted from the Russian language Wikipedia article on Bartini.
Notes to the table:
The term 'ekranolёt' (lit. 'screen effect') refers to a hybrid ground effect vehicle also capable of flight at more normal altitudes (cf ekranoplan);
The appearance in the table of '(project)' or '(the project)' would seem to be a mis-rendering for 'projected' (as opposed to 'draft' or 'production') to indicate a prefeasibility study.
Influences
Sergey Pavlovich Korolev named Bartini as his teacher. At various times and to different degrees, Bartini has been connected with Korolev, Sergey Ilyushin, Oleg Antonov, Vladimir Myasishchev, Alexander Yakovlev and many others. In the literature on aerodynamics there is a term (definition) "Bartini's Effect".
Engineering creativity
The method developed by Bartini has received the name " And - And " from the principle of the connection of mutually exclusive requirements, or "Both that..., And another "...