That I disagree with. After all practically every noticeable Soviet aircraft designer bet on a faulty engine at least once:
And how many Soviet aircraft designers could afford to deceive the country's leadership by conducting state tests of an airplane that did not correspond its
declared (in official documents!) technical condition (armament removed, etc.)? I will emphasize once again: by the time the VK-107A was installed on the Yak-9, the problem was not in the engine, but in the cooling system, which was designed by the aviation engineers for a given engine performance.
1) Yakovlev wasted time and effort on Yak-9U, but still produced the widespread (over 4000 built in a year) Yak-9M and high-performance Yak-3.
There's no arguing with that. But we were only talking about the Yak-9U. The engine itself was not so bad - it had already been refined on Tomashevich's "110" airplane. Yakovlev had only to optimize the cooling system taking into account the engine requirements, but he failed in this work. The "champion" in "running-in" of completely new and unfinished motors was obviously Polikarpov.
2) Lavochkin spent the entire year of 1941 designing LaGG-3 modifications to adopt high-altitude M-105 version or M-107 while literally everyone else were ordered to design their aircrafts to fit the unused M-82 engine (Sukhoi, Yakovlev, Polikarpov, Tupolev, Ilyushin, Mikoyan, Gudkov - the list might go on, but these are who I'm certain about).
Lavochkin had much to do besides installing the M-107 - the number of design and manufacturing defects of the LaGG was enormous. But Gudkov already in August 1941 installed M-82 on the LaGG - the performance of the Gu-82 was lower than that of the I-185M-82, but still much better than those of the LaGG. As a result, the production of the Gu-82 could be established in early 1942. Usually Lavochkin is portrayed as a very polite and intelligent man, but in the story with Gudkov he showed himself as a cynical schemer.
3) Speaking of Polikarpov, he's the only case of an aircraft designer specifically ending his career by betting on a bad engine: he stagnated trials of I-185 with M-82 engine because he was certain M-71 would be finished soon enough and show much better results. As you likely know, M-71 did not in fact get finished soon.
Initially, there were no more problems with the M-71 than with the M-82, it was just that Shvetsov did not have enough staff to finish the two engines at the same time, and the NKAP (People's Commissariat of Aviation Industry) had an opinion that a smaller and less powerful engine should be easier to finish - it was a mistake.
And by the time Polikarpov was practically forced to provide full trial data on I-185 M-82, the compatible in performance La-5 was already being produced, with F and FN models soon to appear in units.
There were TWO different I-185s with M-82s. The first was with the I-185M-71 fuselage, the second was with a fuselage specially designed for the M-82 (the "I" aircraft).
The I-185M-82 "first" was tested in 1941, and it was on it that the M-82 was brought to a more or less acceptable level. Lavochkin received already an improved motor.
The I-185M-82
A "I" had a significantly better flight performance than the La-5
F with a more powerful engine. The La-5 was more or less finalized only by the end of 1943, and some shortcomings (heat in the cockpit) were never sufficiently eliminated.
The I-185M-82
A was superior to the La-5
F in almost all the characteristics (equal only by ground speed), but because of the stupidity of the Soviet leadership, which first forced plant #21 to change the technology to produce a wooden airplane (while the I-16 that was produced had a mixed construction with a large metal share - 40% of the wing skin was of metal), after which it would be necessary to change all the tooling again - in war conditions, this meant an unacceptable production decrease.
The plant in Tbilisi could produce the I-185 (some troubles with manufacturing quality were possible). But the Soviet tradition of winning by quantity did not allow to reach an optimal decision here as well.
Here I'll simply quote Stepanets, managed to find his Yak bible in an acceptable format.
Unfortunately, Stepanects pointed out not all the difficulties with the Yak-9U. Some more information could be found in the book by Yakubovich (not my favorite author, indeed) - ALL control tests (and even the state trials!!!) after all improvements to the Yak-9U design failed.
PS. Are you from Belarus?
