KALININ K-7 - A MASSIVE AIRCRAFT

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In some cases Russian military programmes, in addition to being overly ambitious, are rushed in order to achieve a competitive edge over Western nations, and this in turn compromises their planning and the quality of work which would otherwise have gone into them, thereby having disastrous consequences.

Even some relatively simple Russian aircraft in comparison to the K7 have been catastrophic failures. By way of example the Tupolev Tu-144 was meant to be a supersonic passenger carrier capable of speeds in excess of Mach 2, until it crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1973. It was whole-moulded and tooled from large, single blocks of alloy which allowed structural fatigue to traverse the entire panel and destroy the airworthiness of the frame.

The Tu-144 was completed ahead of time to counter the rise of the Concorde, and it appears that the K-7 may have been a desperate attempt to compete with the German Dornier Do X or maybe even pre-date the Spruce Goose.

Whatever the reason for the failure and despite having been lost to time the K7, like the Ekranoplan, is and always will be a testament to human ingenuity and innovation.

Tu-144 stopped flights due to unprofitability, like Concord, and not because of an accident at the air show.

 

[Penguin]

Some more information from Wikipedia

Kalinin K-7

Design and development

The K-7 was built in two years at Kharkiv starting in 1931.

The K-7 first flew on 11 August 1933. The very brief first flight showed instability and serious vibration caused by the airframe resonating with the engine frequency. The solution to this was thought to be to shorten and strengthen the tail booms, little being known then about the natural frequencies of structures and their response to vibration. The aircraft completed seven test flights before a crash due to structural failure of one of the tail booms on 21 November 1933.[4] The existence of the aircraft had only recently been announced by Pravda which declared it was "victory of the utmost political importance" since it had been built with steel produced in the USSR rather than imported. The accident killed 14 people aboard and one on the ground.[6] Flight speculated that sabotage was suspected as the investigating committee had representation by the state security organization, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU).

However, there appeared recently some speculations in the Russian aviation press about the role of politics and competing design office of Andrei Tupolev, suggesting possible sabotage. Although two more prototypes were ordered in 1933, the project was cancelled in 1935 before they could be completed.

Kalinin K-7 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Those politics are interesting...

Konstantin Alekseevich Kalinin (Born Dec. 17 (29) 1889 in Valuiki, died in 1938 or on Apr. 21, 1940 in Voronezh) was a World War I aviator and Soviet aircraft designer.
Kalinin graduated from the Odessa Military School in 1912, the Gatchina Military Aviation School in 1916, and the Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1925. During the Civil War of 1918–20 he was a Red Army pilot. He became member of the CPSU in 1927. In 1926 he organized and headed an aviation design bureau in Kharkov.[1] He designed the Kalinin K-4, K-5 and K-7.
Kalinin was executed as an enemy of the state in 1938 during the Stalinist purges.[2] According to Soviet records, he died in 1940.
Kalinin was one of the founders and first teachers of the Khar-kov Aviation Institute. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.[3]

Makes you wonder if Tupolev found a way to rid himself of a competitor.

Tupolev designed an built the TB-3/ANT-6 , the world's first cantilever wing four-engine heavy bomber. First prototype was completed on 31 October 1930. Despite almost crashing owing to vibration causing the throttles to close, the test flight on 22 December 1930 was a success. On 20 February 1931, the Soviet Air Force approved mass production of the ANT-6 with M-17 engines. A sole prototype of the TB-4/ANT-16 first flew on 3 July 1933. The test flight program was completed by 29 September 1933 with disappointing results.

Or maybe he just got Lucky, considering he himself got prosecuted too...

on October 21, 1937, Tupolev was arrested together with Petlyakov and the entire directorate of the TsAGI and EDO on trumped up charges of sabotage, espionage and of aiding the Russian Fascist Party. Many of his colleagues were executed. In 1939, Tupolev was moved from a prison to an NKVD sharashka for aircraft designers in Bolshevo near Moscow, where many ex-TsAGI people had already been sent to work. The sharashka soon moved to Moscow and was dubbed "Tupolevka" after its most eminent inmate. Tupolev was tried and convicted in 1940 with a ten-year sentence. During this time he developed the Tupolev Tu-2,[4] He was released in July 1941 "to conduct important defence work." (He was not rehabilitated fully until two years after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953.)

USSR did not treat its bomber designers kindly ...

 

[Penguin]

Speaking of giant aircraft ... here's a nice pic: its a bird eat bird world

C-5 v. An-124

 

[Penguin]

An-124 (yum, fresh jet)

AN-225

 

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C-5 versus C-17

C-17 v IL76