Yak-42: The Soviet Airliner that Failed

Video from the channel Skyships Eng about Yakovlev Yak-42, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 18:28. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

An English-language documentary about the Yakovlev Yak-42, the regional airliner meant to renew the Soviet fleet, which — between accidents and the crisis that followed the USSR's collapse — never reached the spread originally intended.

In the early 1970s Aeroflot was looking to replace the Il-18 and the Tu-134, and Yakovlev proposed scaling up its successful Yak-40. The order came in 1972. The design settled on three high-bypass D-36 engines, a 3.8 m diameter fuselage with six-abreast seating and about 120 passengers. The first prototype, with a straight wing, flew in spring 1975. Its cruise speed, limited to 680 km/h, led to the adoption of a swept wing. On the way to the 1977 Paris Air Show, a prototype crashed in Lviv with no casualties and was secretly replaced by another aircraft bearing the same registration. Certification came at the end of 1980, and production was split between Smolensk and Saratov.

In summer 1982, a design flaw in the stabilizer mechanism caused an accident on the Leningrad-Kyiv route, and the fleet was grounded for two years. The Yak-42D raised the maximum takeoff weight to 56.5 t and the range to 2,700 km, and was exported to Cuba and China. After the USSR's collapse it served as a testbed for the D-236 propfan. In 2003 the 183rd production example was built. The Yak-242 project ended up serving as the basis for the MC-21.