A friend at the controls

On 12 May 1927 a little wood-and-fabric biplane lifted off in Moscow with Yulian Piontkovsky at the controls. He was a friend of the designer, a 21-year-old who had built it in an academy club against the wishes of the academy’s directors. Piontkovsky rated its handling excellent and later flew it non-stop from Sevastopol to Moscow. Thirteen years later, the same pilot was killed testing the prototype of the Yak-1 fighter. Between those two flights lies the making of Alexander Yakovlev, and of the bureau that still dates its birthday to that first hop of the AIR-1.

The boy without the right parents

Yakovlev, born in Moscow in 1906, the son of a Nobel Brothers oil company employee, built his first glider in 1924. It won a prize and a job as a labourer at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy — but his applications to study there were refused for his lack of proletarian origins. He got in at last in 1927 and graduated in 1931. On 15 January 1934 his light-aircraft group at Moscow Plant No. 39 was made an independent bureau, soon to be Plant No. 115. Its UT-2 trainer, built 7,243 times, taught a generation of Soviet pilots to fly.

Thirty-seven thousand Yaks

Then came the war. The I-26 prototype first flew on 13 January 1940 and was ordered into production as the Yak-1 barely a month later. From it grew the Yak-7, Yak-9 and Yak-3, essentially one design in successive forms. Counted together, some 37,000 were built, which would make the Yak the most produced fighter family in history. The Free French Normandie-Niemen regiment flew Yaks and scored its last 99 victories in the Yak-3; the women of the 586th Fighter Regiment flew Yak-1s. Yakovlev himself served Stalin as deputy minister of the aviation industry from 1940 to 1946.

The coin toss and the jump-jets

The jet age opened with a gamble. According to historians Bill Gunston and Yefim Gordon, Yakovlev and Mikoyan-Gurevich tossed a coin on 24 April 1946 to decide whose jet would fly first; Yakovlev lost, and the Yak-15 flew second, the same day. The bureau went on to the Yak-25, the first Soviet all-weather interceptor, and the supersonic Yak-28. Its strangest speciality was vertical flight: the Yak-36 hovered in 1963, the Yak-38 became the Soviet Navy’s only operational jump-jet, and the supersonic Yak-141 set twelve world records before the Soviet collapse killed it.

Airliners for Aeroflot

Civil aviation brought a different kind of fame. The Yak-40 of 1966 was the first Soviet airliner designed to Western airworthiness rules; Saratov built 1,011 or 1,013, and by 1993 Aeroflot’s fleet had carried 354 million passengers. The Yak-42 was the first Soviet airliner with high-bypass turbofans, but a tailplane jackscrew failure in 1982 killed all 132 aboard and grounded the type until 1984. Meanwhile Soviet pilots won world aerobatic titles in the bureau’s Yak-50 and Yak-55 — and in 2024 Ukrainian crews were filmed hunting drones with a shotgun from an open-canopy Yak-52.

From bureau to brand

The 1990s nearly broke the bureau. The Yak-130 trainer began as a joint venture with Italy’s Aermacchi, which split in 2000 and became the M-346. In 2004 Irkut took control and staff fell from 1,400 to 311. In 2006 both were folded into the state United Aircraft Corporation, and in July 2023 Irkut itself took the Yakovlev name, becoming the civil airliner division of UAC. The MC-21 and SJ-100 now carry it, though under sanctions both have slipped: the first production MC-21-310 flew on 3 August 2026, and SJ-100 deliveries were pushed to the second half of 2027.

Továrny

• Plant No. 115 (design bureau and experimental works) · Leningradsky prospekt, Moscow — Bureau’s own production base from 1935; production base wound up in 2004
• Saratov Aviation Plant · Saratov — Built the Yak-25 (as Factory No. 292) and all Yak-40s
• Sokol plant · Nizhny Novgorod — Built the Yak-130 prototypes and the first Russian Air Force batch
• Irkutsk Aviation Plant · Irkutsk — Built the Yak-28 in the 1960s; Yak-130 and MC-21 line today

Lidé

• Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev · founder and chief designer, 1934–1984 — Deputy minister of the aviation industry 1940–1946; twice Hero of Socialist Labour; died 1989
• Yulian Piontkovsky · test pilot — Flew the AIR-1 on its first flight in 1927; killed in the I-26 prototype on 27 April 1940
• Sergei Yakovlev · designer — Led the team that created the Yak-55 aerobatic aircraft
• Dmitry Drach · chief constructor — Designed the Yak-54
• Andrey Sinitsyn · chief test pilot — Flew the first Yak/AEM-130 on 25 April 1996

Rekordy a prvenství

• Yak-141 set 12 world records in 1991, registered under that designation because Yak-41 was classified
• Yak-24 set two payload-to-altitude records on 17 December 1955: 2,000 kg to 5,082 m and 4,000 kg to 2,902 m
• Yak-18 set an international speed record for its class in 1951
• Soviet pilots won the 1976 World Aerobatic Championship in Yak-50s and the 1984 title in Yak-55s
• Yak-40 was the first Soviet airliner certificated in Italy and West Germany