Notes from Alan Brown on the Maxim Gorky

In about 1933 or ‘34, Josef Stalin decided that Russia should make the world’s largest airplane. Tupolev, who had previously made two successful six-engined planes, was instructed to design and manufacture the forthcoming airplane, and was given two years to complete the task.

One of the reasons that I picked this airplane to model was that I could see what I thought Tupolev went through in completing this assignment. Failure, of course, was not an option in Stalin’s Russia, so he designed this fine airplane.

At this size, the engines available in Russia were not powerful enough, and so the state engine manufacturer had to come up with engines to match the airplane. It’s almost a rule in the aircraft industry that if you are designing a brand-new airplane, you use existing well-proven engines, and if you are developing a brand-new engine, you check it out on an existing well-proven airframe. But in this case, these were not options, and so both airframe and engines were new.

Tupolev’s previous large airplanes were very good-looking, with nicely mounted engines on optimally tapered wings. However, if you look closely at the Maxim Gorky (named after the early 1900’s  communist poet), you will see one or two anomalies, which I can only ascribe to the engines not developing the power required for the task. Tupolev did, incidentally, complete his assigned task in two years, amazingly enough, although under Stalin the alternatives were not very acceptable! But, and here I’m guessing, the final design had late modifications to meet requirements. If you look closely at the airplane, you’ll see a few things that were clearly changed late in the game. 

First, Tupolev, I’m guessing, added two engines on top of the fuselage to give the required total engine thrust. This increased the weight of the airplane to where some of the control surfaces had to be increased in size to accommodate the existing Russian airfields from which the airplane would be flown. If you look closely, you’ll see that the flaps are increased in chord, so that they extend beyond the original wing trailing edge line. Also, the rudder size has obviously been increased by increasing its chord. These two changes seem to me to be the result of the increased aircraft weight versus the airfield limitations.

The history of the airplane is fairly well known. It was flown completely within Russia with a fairly small passenger list (no pressurization in those days), and the passengers sat up front on something like a bridge, much as they might have done as first-class passengers on a ship. To demonstrate the size of the airplane, it was often flown accompanied by a couple of small Russian biplane Polikarpov fighters (less than 30 feet wingspan), flying off each wingtip.

Then one day one of the Soviet fighter pilots decided that it would be neat to do a loop around the outer wing of the Gorki. He obviously had no idea of the strength of the wingtip trailing vortex, and his little airplane got swept back and slammed into the tail of the larger airplane. This caused both airplanes to crash with everyone being killed. Apparently, the pilot’s name went into the lexography of the Soviet Air Force as representing the most stupid thing you could do in the air! And that’s my understanding of how the airplane came to look like it did. 

Cheers, Alan