Robert Bartini 14 May 1897 6 December 1974

Robert Bartini 14 May 1897 - 6 December 1974

Born in Fiume, 14 may 1897 u Son of an married man and an unmarried 17 year old girl who drowned herself after his father didn’t want to recognize him as his son u

u The girl’s aunt, impoverished aristocrat, granted custody of him to a peasant family

u After receiving excellent family education, he graduated from gymnasium in 1915 and was drafted and sent to school of officers' reserve in Banska Bystrica where he graduated in 1916

He attended flying school in 1921 and Politecnico di Milano in 1922 u He soon became a member of Italian Comunist Party and, after the Fascist takeover in italy, was secretly transferred to the USSR as an aviation engineer u

In 1930 he designed Stal-6 aircraft which established Soviet speed record u However, because of the problems with cooling system and bad view from the cockpit only one aircraft was built u

u In 1934 he constructed Stal-7, a twin-engined transport aircraft that showed high efficiency in speed, range and load but, during full load testing, it crashed which resulted in Bartoni being sent to Syberian gulag

u In 1939, Vladimir Yermolaev, who replaced Bartini, repaired Stal-7 and transformed it to Yermolayev Yer-2, a long-range Soviet medium bomber which was used to bomb Berlin after Operation Barbarossa in 1941

u He continued his work on new aircraft designs as a prisoner and was released in 1946

u During the 1970 s Bartini, in collaboration with the Beriev Design Bureau designed VVA-14 (vertical take-off amphibious aircraft), aircraft that was supposed to be used against United States Navy Polaris missile submarines, but after his death the project was closed

u As a versatile person, Bartini also published papers concerning aviation construction materials and technology, aerodynamics, dynamics of flight, and even theoretical physics

Because of his noble descent he was named Red Baron ( NOT Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, famous German World War I fighter pilot!) u In the literature on aerodynamics there is a term (definition) "Effect of Bartini" u

u u Hed died in Moscow, 6 December 1974 "Bartini was fertile, exceedingly fertile in ideas and therefore generous. His ideas surpassed by far contemporary time and that is why only small part of them had been realized in metal, in aircraft. But even those ideas that were not realized in metal acted as a catalyst for the progress of our aerotechnics" (O. K. Antonov)

QUIZ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Where was Robert Bartini born? How did his mother die? Why is Stal-6 so special? Which aircraft did Yermolaev use for constructing Yer-2? Why was Bartini sent to gulag? What was his nickname? Where did he die?

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