Ilyushin Il-18V

The Il-18V was the main production version of the four-engined Ilyushin Il-18 turboprop and the most numerous member of the family: the English and French Wikipedias put its production at 334 aircraft, built until 1965. It did not stem from a structural redesign but from the experience gained with the early Il-18A and Il-18B in Aeroflot service: the airframe was unchanged, but the interior was completely rearranged, the galley was moved and minor system changes were introduced. According to the English Wikipedia the first Il-18V appeared in December 1959; the French Wikipedia adds that it first flew on 10 October 1959. Entry into service with Aeroflot is placed in 1961 by the English, Spanish and Italian Wikipedias, and the Russian encyclopaedia airwar.ru likewise calls it the "improved series variant of 1961", although the same source brackets its production between 1960 and 1965. The starting dates thus vary between late 1959 and 1961 depending on the source.

The essential change from the Il-18B was the new cabin layout. Airwar.ru describes how the entrance doors were moved into two vestibules that divided the passenger cabin into three compartments seating 20, 55 and 14: the forward vestibule, in the plane of the propellers, housed the wardrobes and toilets, while the rear one held the galley-buffet. The logic, shared across the whole Il-18 programme, was to place in the noisiest zone — the propeller disc — the spaces where passengers do not remain in flight. The Russian Wikipedia describes the same three-compartment arrangement, with a centre cabin of 45 to 55 seats and a rear cabin of 8 to 14, and notes that the Il-18V had seven different cabin configurations. The quoted capacity differs between sources: the English, Spanish and Italian Wikipedias give 90 to 100 passengers; the Nemeth Designs technical description states that the reworked fuselage layout initially allowed up to 110 seats on the Il-18V and 122 on the Il-18E, later capped at 100. In 1963-1964, according to airwar.ru, the aircraft received additional and improved flight and navigation equipment.

Power came from four Ivchenko AI-20K turboprops, the AI-20 variant that had replaced the Kuznetsov NK-4 after the reliability problems of the first Il-18As. The maximum take-off weight of the Il-18V was 61,200 kg, the same as the Il-18B, according to the Russian Wikipedia and the Nemeth Designs documentation; the Il-18E raised it to 61,400 kg and the Il-18D to 64,000 kg. The Il-18 flight crew consisted of five — captain, co-pilot, navigator, radio operator and flight engineer — plus four cabin attendants. The pressurised cabin held sea-level pressure up to 5,200 m and a temperature of around 20 °C at any altitude, which airwar.ru presents as a level of comfort comparable to that of contemporary jets.

The Il-18V was also the version that carried the type's exports. The English Wikipedia lists Il-18Vs with Malév (Hungary) and one stored example at Air Koryo (North Korea); the colour profiles on airwar.ru show aircraft of this version in the liveries of Interflug (East Germany), Cubana and TAROM (Romania), and the Russian Wikipedia illustrates an Il-18V in TAROM colours. Two of the aircraft preserved at the Aeropark museum in Budapest are former Malév Il-18Vs: HA-MOA (serial number 180001903) and HA-MOG (184007103). In the USSR the Il-18V also made a pioneering flight: one aircraft was fitted with additional tanks in the passenger cabin, raising fuel capacity from 23,500 to 31,000 litres, in order to fly to Antarctica. The Russian Wikipedia dates the first Antarctic flight to 15 December 1961, over the route Tashkent–Delhi–Rangoon–Jakarta–Darwin–Sydney–Christchurch–McMurdo; airwar.ru places the tank installation in 1962. From this came the Il-18V "polar", a single aircraft adapted for Polar Aviation, and the Il-18V-26A, with an auxiliary cabin tank, a revised window arrangement and enlarged oil tanks in the wings; the Russian Wikipedia states that 3 of this long-range version, with a 20-seat cabin, were built in 1962, and the French Wikipedia notes it was at times designated Il-18D before the true Il-18D existed.

Numerous conversions were carried out on Il-18V airframes. The Il-18T designation covered civil and military freighters converted from Il-18A, B and V aircraft, with the Il-18VT as the military transport/medevac version based on the V. Two Il-18Vs became Il-18RT telemetry relay aircraft for rocket and unmanned vehicle trials; another became the Il-18USh navigator trainer with workstations in the cabin, developed in 1972 according to the Russian Wikipedia and ultimately passed over by the Soviet Air Force in favour of a Tu-124 variant. One Il-18V served as an engine testbed at the Czechoslovak flight test centre (Il-18LL), and there was an Il-18V "Salon" VIP transport: the Russian Wikipedia records that between 1956 and 1969 some 20 Il-18B, Il-18V and Il-18D aircraft were converted to "Salon" configuration, with ten cabin layouts developed to order for Aeroflot and foreign airlines.

The programme's later evolution built directly on the Il-18V: the Il-18E (1965-1966) increased seating and improved the air conditioning and cabin finish, and the Il-18I/Il-18D replaced the AI-20K with more powerful AI-20Ms and added wing centre-section tanks for range. Several Il-18Vs survive as monuments or museum pieces: besides the two in Budapest, the Russian Wikipedia cites the example at the Central Air Force Museum in Monino, CCCP-75813 installed as a monument at Merke (Kazakhstan) since 1980, and CCCP-75689 (serial 189001204), placed in 1977 beside a cinema in Simferopol as a children's theatre and scrapped in 2000.