Let's have a look at Every Jetliner Ever Made. In alphabetical order. In this instalment I'm going to cover Antonov and BAC.
It would have been so easy to skip over the Soviet-era aircraft manufacturers. Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev and so on. How can I judge whether their designs were any good? What were they like? Were they competitive with Western designs?
And perhaps the biggest question, what did they mean? An airliner isn't just a collection of statistics, it also has meaning. The Boeing 747 means something. It's the Queen of the Skies, the star of Airport 1975, full-on 1970s golden age luxury top deck Pan Am disco-era cocaine-guzzling naff glamour. Concorde also means something. It's the airliner of mid-80s yuppies and captains of British industry. It's the airliner of Sam Fox wearing a swimsuit backwards so that you can see her chest. Even the anonymous Airbus A320 means something, because it's the aeroplane Daniella Westbrook uses to fly to Spain or wherever it is she goes. Airliners are like cars. They have meaning beyond their functionality.
But what does the Ilyushin Il-86 mean? If you're a keen aviation fan the Il-86 is a physical representation of the Soviet Union's stagnation during the Brezhnev era. It was launched in 1981, but it had the fuselage of a 1970s widebody and engines from the 1960s. It was out of date, behind the times. For you and I, however, the Il-86 is just a number and some letters. It would have been easy to skip the Soviet airliners. Easy, and weak. Margaret Thatcher would not have approved, and I will not fail her.
ANTONOV (Ukraine)
Antonov was founded in the late 1940s as a vehicle for the designs of Oleg Antonov, who cut his teeth during the Great Patriotic War designing aircraft for the Yakovlev bureau. Technically Antonov's company was called OKB-153, and as per standard Soviet practice it was more a design bureau than a fully-integrated design-and-manufacture organisation, but let's call it Antonov. The company's first product... the organisation's first design was the AN-2 biplane, pictured above, an incredibly useful utility plane that remained in production right up until the early 2000s.
The AN-2 was followed by a series of turboprop transport aircraft that were constructed in great numbers for various Warsaw Pact air forces, all of which are no doubt fascinating but are outside the scope of this series.
Nowadays the company is famous in the west for the An-124 Ruslan and An-225 Mirya cargo aircraft, which were produced in tiny numbers, just two in the case of the An-225. In theory they could be configured as passenger airliners - the An-124 even had a dedicated passenger deck, much like the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy - but in practice they never were. Instead the An-124's passenger deck was designed to carry ancillary staff, such as load handlers or engineers.
The smaller An-72 short-take-off cargo transport could also be configured as a passenger aircraft, but I can't find any evidence that it was ever used as such, at least not for very long. The An-72 (and its stretched variant, the An-74) did however lead to Antonov's one and only jetliner.
The An-72 had a peculiar configuration, with two engines mounted above the wing. This had the benefit of keeping the engines away from runway debris, and it also meant that the flow of engine exhaust passing over the wing generated extra lift. In the 1990s Antonov decided to turn the An-72 into a passenger airliner, aimed at the regional market. The result was eventually launched in 2004 as the Antonov An-148, although it was initially called the An-74TK300. Why An-148? Because it was twice as good as the An-74, probably.
The chief modifications were the wing and engines. For the An-148 Antonov streamlined the wing so that it performed better during the cruise portion of flight, and mounted the engines in conventional under-wing pods, where they were a lot easier to service. The resulting aircraft had the classic configuration of a regional jet, with a stubby fuselage, a T-tail, and a vaguely hunchbacked appearance. Not a million miles from the BAe 146, but with two engines. Passenger load varied from around 60-80 people, depending on configuration, with a range of anything from 1,300 - 2,700 miles depending on model. A stretched version, the An-158, had seating for almost 100 passengers. On the whole the An-148 / 158 was larger and longer-legged than most regional jets, but not large enough to compete with something like a Boeing 737.
Commercial operations began with airlines in Ukraine and Russia in 2009. There were at one time over 150 orders, but in practice total production amounted to only 47 aircraft, including six An-158s, which were all used by the Cuban state airline Cubana. The remainder were bought by various airlines and government ministries in Russia and Ukraine, with two going to North Korea's state airline Air Koryo. Sales were not helped by Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and were dealt a death blow by the subsequent general invasion, with several operators citing the difficulty of sourcing spare parts.
I'm not qualified to talk about the economic issues affecting the Eastern European aviation industry in the post-Soviet era, but I have the impression that the An-148 suffered from entering production at a time when regional jets were starting to fall out of fashion, and also for its odd configuration, which was twice as large as most other regional jets but not large enough to replace a Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. The contemporary Bombardier CRJ-1000 had roughly the same problem. If it had been launched twenty years earlier it might have captured the same market as the BAe 146, which it closely resembled in terms of size and range if not engine count, but by the mid-2000s the market was instead shifting to full-sized airliners that could be used on a wider range of routes.
As of this writing the aircraft theoretically remains in production, but the last airframes were delivered in 2018.
BAC (Great Britain)
The British Aircraft Corporation was formed in 1960 from the government-led merger of English Electric, Vickers, Bristol, and Hunting, all of which are much easier to spell than Hawker-Siddeley. Before the merger Hunting had designed a small jet airliner that could target the same market as the classic piston-engined Douglas DC-3, with thirty seats and a modest range. After the merger BAC decided to expand the specification, which in retrospect was a smart idea, because this series of articles is full of jet airliners that were too small to make economic sense.
The resulting airliner was the BAC 1-11, usually referred to as the One-Eleven, which was an internal product code and should not be confused with the Lockheed L-1011, a completely different aircraft.
The 1-11 had two engines mounted either side of the rear fuselage, a wing mounted towards the rear of the aircraft, and a T-tail, with a high-mounted tailplane. The configuration was unusual at the time, shared only with the Sud Aviation Caravelle, but within a few years it became much more popular, albeit not because of the BAC 1-11.
The 1-11 was powered by a pair of Rolls-Royce Spey engines, which were powerful, but also noisy and very thirsty, something that increasingly became problematic as fuel prices rose and noise regulations tightened in the 1970s. The configuration kept the engines away from the passenger compartment and above the wake of the wings, and by mounting them above the ground the hope was that they wouldn't suck up debris from the runway.
The engine location necessitated a high-mounted tailplane, which indirectly led to the crash of the 1-11's prototype in 1963. Although the tailplane was out of the wash of turbulent air from the wings in level flight, it was caught in the wake of the wings during high angles of attack, such as when the aircraft was coming in to land. Without control authority from the tail there was no way to push the nose of the 1-11 back down, which resulted in the prototype belly-flopping into the ground with the loss of all on board. This problem became known as a "deep stall", and it was a major problem with T-tail warplanes, notably the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter and McDonnell F-101 Voodoo. Ultimately the problem was solved with a mixture of aerodynamic tweaks and a simple fly-by-wire system that used hydraulic power to push the nose of the aircraft down.
The 1-11 entered passenger service in 1965, initially with British United Airways, but in something of a coup it also entered service with Braniff of the United States, who had ordered a clutch of 1-11s in 1961, when the aircraft was still in development.
The initial model carried 89 passengers over a range of 750 miles; later models increased the load to 119 passengers and over twice the range. The post-war British aviation industry produced a number of designs that were compromised in one way or the other by technical peculiarities or odd configurations, but the 1-11 was by all accounts a simple, well-designed airliner with no quirks. About the only technical issue it faced was its awkward size, slightly too large for the regional market but not large enough to be a coast-to-coast people carrier.
At the time the US aviation industry had nothing comparable. As mentioned elsewhere the US lagged behind Europe in the post-war years. Europe was forced to rebuild its aviation industry from scratch, so Britain, France, and Germany jumped directly from piston airliners to turboprops and jet engines, while Douglas and Lockheed in the United States continued with piston designs, because why not? Jets were uncharted territory and piston airliners were a proven technology. In this environment the BAC 1-11 purchase by Braniff was a shock in US aviation circles at the time. To make things worse American Airlines went on to place an order for thirteen 1-11s in 1963.
Unfortunately the 1-11 was both blessed and cursed by its timing. On the positive side, and unlike the Avro Jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, and to a lesser extent the Sud-Aviation Caravelle, it was released at a time when airlines had got over their initial skepticism of jet engines. And beyond the crash of its prototype the 1-11 had none of the design problems that affected first-generation jetliners, although two fatal crashes in 1966 (due to turbulence) and 1967 (a faulty auxiliary power unit pump) must have given airlines pause.
But on the negative side the crash of the prototype delayed the 1-11's entry to service until 1965, by which time Boeing had began test flights of its three-engined Boeing 727, while Douglas had announced that it was working on a new jetliner, the DC-9. The 727 ended up appealing to a slightly different market - it was larger - but the DC-9 competed directly with the 1-11. It had more powerful engines and greater range than the 1-11, and on announcement in 1963 it immediately began winning orders. Those orders might have led nowhere, but Douglas really committed itself to jet power, and the DC-9 entered service on schedule in late 1965, only a few months after the 1-11.
BAC eventually sold almost 250 1-11s, including nine that were licence-built in Romania during the 1980s. This made it one of the most popular British jetliners, but once Douglas and Boeing entered the jetliner market the orders tailed off. At the time of its launch the One-Eleven's only real US competitor was the four-engined Boeing 720, which was much larger, but as mentioned it struggled to compete with the DC-9. Two years later Boeing launched the 737, which also had more power and range, and at that point sales of the 1-11 dried up. There was a general feeling that the DC-9 and 737 could be stretched to meet future demand, while the 1-11 was at the end of its development cycle.
The 1-11's prospects were not helped by the conceptually similar but slightly smaller Fokker F28 Fellowship, which was launched a few years later and attracted almost as many orders. UK production continued at a very low rate until as late as 1984. BAC proposed a number of enlarged successors, including the 2-11 and 3-11, but the two programmes were abandoned so as not to compete with what would eventually become the Airbus A300.
In the UK the 1-11 was particularly valued by low-cost package tour airlines, such as Dan-Air and the nascent Ryanair, who found them perfect for Spanish package holidays. Dan-Air infamously fitted their 1-11s with seat-back catering, whereby packed lunches were locked into a pair of compartments in the back of each seat. The idea was that passengers outbound to Spain would be given a key for the top compartment, and those coming back on the return flight would be given a key for the bottom compartment, which by that time was probably pretty whiffy.
The 1-11 slowly left service in the 1990s, largely because its Spey engines were too noisy for modern regulations and guzzled too much fuel. BAC eventually merged with Hawker to form British Aerospace, which continues today as BAE Systems. In 2010 the 1-11's type certificate was revoked in the EU on account of its excessive noise, and as of 2024 none remain in the air.
And that's Antonov and BAC. Next, Bombardier. And then Convair, who released two airliners that were absolutely superb at transforming aviation fuel into smoke and noise. And Dassault, whose only airliner was a heck of a thing.
