"Rafaelyanz and His Planes" - by Konstantin Udalov

gabrielorosco

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Hello, friends!

Today I had an opportunity to take a look in one more book written by our dear friend Kosntantin Udalov. This time, the book is devoted to Mr. Rafaelyanz and his planes and projects. As it is mark of Udalov’s books, this one starts with a very complete biography of Rafaelyanz. In my opinion, this is the most complete biography I have seen in a Mr. Udalov’s book, mainly because of the huge amount of documents and reports available. There is a large timeline covering the entire life of Rafaelyanz, year by year, with description of the most important facts during his life. This first section of the book is full of documents and photographs, making the whole reading and understanding of the facts easier. Rafaelyanz started his career of aircraft design during the twenties, starting with relatively small and similar models ranging from RAF-1 to RAF-5. All of them were single-engined and with a monoplane configuration. After showing detailed information about these first projects, the book advance through more complex designs. The first project, called MTS, had a clear inspiration on Burnelli designs. It was a twin engine aircraft dedicated to passenger transport, with a wide fuselage between the wings. This feature made possible the use of the lifting body effect, providing great stability and good lift during flight and meneuvers, including take off and landing operations and while flying low and slow. After the project mentioned above, Rafaelyanz continued his career with propeller-driven aircraft designs focused on civilian use. The major difference from the first five projects is that biplanes were also designed and tested, instead of only monoplanes, and now twin engine aircraft were also present. The book continues with some very interesting projects, the true “flying tanks”. To call these machines unique was nothing. They were full of innovations. The book describes these projects with a lot of documents and images, showing how these machines were meant to work. After this oddities, Rafaelyanz continued his career designing commercial aircraft, mainly for transport use. During the years of the 1950 decade, he moved once again to more complex projects. He designed and tested the principles of jet powered VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) aircraft, all of wich had great influence on subsequent modern VTOL aircraft designs. I highly recommend this book for every aviation enthusiast and specialist. It is one of the most complete books ever written by Mr. Konstantin Udalov, with unprecedent amount of historical materials like documents and photographs combined with new illustrations and action pictures of a high quality standard, like all other books of this author. And last, I should mention - wondeful cover by famouse artist Marek Rys. Thank you and have a nice reading!
 

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Any mentioning of Raf-11bis? Or any military project from 1938 to 1945?
 
Hi,

here it's;

RAF-1
RAF-2
RAF-3 project
RAF-4 project
RAF-5
Auto-glisser-Plane (three in one) project
MTS project
Passenger plane from 1933 project
R-5L Limousine
Flying tank project
BARM light aircraft project
RAF-11
PR-12
U-2L
U-2M
Kolkhoznik project
Turbolet
Mi-1 VTOL project
490 VTOL project
 
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