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?
Kyiv, 1938
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 It was out of date, behind the times.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.
An Antonov AN-2 biplane, which remained in production from 1947 to
2001
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.
Antonov AN-72
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.
Antonov An-148
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.
BAC 1-11 in service with American Airlines
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 1-11's configuration had been pioneered by the Sud Aviation
Caravelle, pictured here, which was one of the very first jetliners, entering service in
1959
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.
A Douglas DC-9 in US military service
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.
