The Silvansky I-220 IS: How Not to Design a Fighter Aircraft
In the annals of aviation history, there have been some questionable aircraft designs that, in hindsight, one wonders how they ever managed to get built. This applied to civilian aircraft as well as military aircraft. The disaster of the British Tarrant Tabor bomber (1919), the horror show that was the American Cantilever Aero Bullet (1918), and the fatal failure of the Soviet Kalinin K-7 bomber (1933) are all examples of extremely flawed aircraft that got from the drawing board, to prototype, and in many cases, a disastrous end. The Soviet Silvansky I-220 IS (Iosef Stalin) was one such plane that history has added to this list and some consider the IS the worst warplane ever to be designed.
The man behind the IS was Alexander Vasilievich Silvansky. Silvansky was a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute and although he had the degree in his hand and actually had practical experience working in aircraft manufacturing plants, historians are clear to say that Silvansky nary knew the difference between a aileron and a wing spar. In fact, noted Soviet aviation historian Vadim Borisovich Shavrov compared Silvansky to the fictional con man Ostap Bender created by the Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov. The story of the IS begins in 1937 when Mikhail Moiseyevich Kaganovich, the People’s Commissar of Defense Industry, gave Silvansky the task of designing a new, single-engine fighter. This task came to Silvansky because Silvansky had a connection within the elite circles. Silvansky, having no concept of how to design an aircraft, sought out anyone who did understand aircraft and he ran into Ivan Lemishev, a 1922 graduate of the Aviation Engineers School located in Kiev, Russia. As Silvansky had his own design bureau which was funded, stocked with the needed equipment, and housed in a section of the Novosibirsk Aviation Factory №153, Lemishev signed on in February 1938. Lemishev was joined by a number of employees from the former Kalinin, Grigorovich, and Nazarov aircraft design bureaus. In short order, work began on the IS but when the majority of the members of the design bureau were more technically inclined rather than aeronautical inclined, the IS was off to a poor start. Silvansky spent his time trying to get his design bureau moved closer to Moscow and hyped the IS as the best fighter in the world. In the meantime, Lemishev and the others did the best they could and when the initial design was nearly completed, only then did Silvansky step in to “fix mistakes”. A mock-up of the IS was constructed and presented and against all logic, after the mock-up and design drafts were reviewed, the IS was approved to proceed. Silvansky’s IS hype included a heavy armament of two cannons, four machine-guns, and a bomb load while boasting the IS would best the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Polikarpov I-180, then under development, could simply be canceled as the IS would best it. The fact that Silvansky’s claims swayed the men who witnessed the mock-up points to Shavrov’s con-man comparison.
Work on the first prototype commenced and was completed in 1939 and already, Lemishev and many of the other bureau employees saw the IS was a disaster. Construction issues included miscalculating the length of the landing gear to the point that they would not fit into the wheel wells. After shortening the landing gear, they then found out that the wheel wells were too shallow to allow the wheels to be fully withdrawn (this was never corrected). This was not helped by Silvansky himself who decided to fix some of the issues with the IS his way. Following the landing gear fiasco, the propeller blades were too close to the ground and Silvansky literally took a hacksaw and sawed four inches off the end of each blade. In addition, any engine component that poked up and ruined the contours of the cowling, Silvansky’s solution was to take a hammer and beat them down. The IS commenced taxi trials on September 24, 1939 without, apparently, too much mishap. Silvansky’s constant needling to get his design bureau moved finally paid off when it was shifted to Kimry, some 100 miles from Moscow in February 1940. Perhaps not surprisingly, Silvansky spent more time in Moscow than at his design bureau. By this time, personnel of the Silvansky Design Bureau started to find any reason to leave, not wanting to be anywhere around when the IS failed. The first flight occurred on February 17, 1940 and it was a colossal failure. The test pilot managed to get the IS off the ground but the altitude never exceeded 492 feet and so horrid was the control that it took everything the test pilot had to land the IS. In total, only three test flights were made, none of the flights lasting longer than a few minutes. Worse, in order to even get the IS off the ground required all of the armaments to be removed in order to lighten the aircraft. The IS was not helped by having to use an under-powered engine (see below) and the aerodynamics of the wings was spoiled by the protruding wheels. One of the test pilots was quoted as calling the IS “bad shit” and all of the test pilots unanimously said the IS was all but unflyable. Following the horrible showing of the IS, the People’s Commissar of the Aviation Industry Alexey Ivanovich Shakhurin ordered the Silvansky Design Bureau dissolved, the personnel dispersed, and Silvansky himself held liable for the utter disaster. A second prototype of the IS had been under construction but this was halted and presumably, it was scrapped. The first prototype IS was seized and shipped to the Moscow Aviation Institute where it was put on display as an illustration of how not to design an aircraft. Silvansky was banned from further involvement in aviation and, amazingly, escaped both prosecution and persecution but Lemishev was not so lucky when, on February 15, 1941, he disappeared in Baltimore, Maryland and was never heard from again.
The IS, in appearance, oddly (or not surprisingly) bore a resemblance to the successful Polikarpov I-16 fighter. For an engine, the IS was to use the Tumansky M-88A 14-cylinder, air-cooled, twin-row radial engine that developed 1,085 horsepower at 15,584 feet. However, the IS was actually fitted with the 950 horsepower M-87A engine as the M-88A was not yet available. The ZSMV-2 propeller was a three-bladed, variable-pitch type. Total fuel carried was 79 gallons and if required, a total of 52 gallons of extra fuel could be carried in two under wing drop tanks. For weapons, two 12.7mm ShVAK machine-guns were fitted, one in each wing. Two 7.62mm ShKAS machine-guns were fitted, one in each wing root, while another two ShKAS machine-guns were fitted into the nose, between the engine cylinders. A single 110 pound bomb could be carried under each wing. The IS was 21.9 feet long, 9.1 feet high, had a 29.6 wingspan, and a 150.7 square foot wing area with a wing loading of 35.8 pounds per square foot. Because the IS never was put through its paces, performance was never validated. It was estimated that the top speed with the M-88A engine was 364mph at 15,584 feet with an estimated 6 minute climb to 16,404 feet. Operational ceiling was estimated to be 35,597 feet with a maximum range of 357 miles with an operational range of 270 miles.
As a note, the Silvansky I-220 should not be confused with the Mikoyan-Gurevich I-220 high-altitude interceptor project which commenced in 1942.
