Clashmaker.com

Surprisingly, but one ‘loose guess’ expressed by myself with regard to some painting job features on some vintage aircraft seen at Oshkosh ensued an interesting discussion which you can see in a string of replics under this picture on Clashmaker’s Flickr photostream.

So, this thing started when I put a request to help identify a plane seen at Oshkosh ‘AirVenture’ last year

A mister “formernavalperson” provided us with a valuable piece of information, identifying this vintage plane as “an Army Air Force PT-23–the radial engine variant of the Fairchild PT-19 Cornell”.

Then, encouraged by this knowledgeable person’s willingness to maintain a conversation, I went on, and asked if he would comment on a feature of painting job seen on many American planes from that epoch, - such as ‘red and white stripes on the tail‘, specifically.

I noticed that pattern applied on a number of planes, and most of them looked to me as ‘trainers‘..

..so, I ‘loosely guessed’ that it might be a feature of standard painting characteristic to a class of planes, - trainers, specifically, - a sort of indication, giving some clue to anybody around: ‘ROOKIE PILOT UNDER CONTROLS‘

Soon formernavalperson came up with another clarification: “The red and white stripes were applied to the rudders of virtually all US aircraft up to 1941/42. Nothing to do with training duties”.

Great, I thanked Mr.formernavalperson, and kept going. Now I wanted another idea to put on trial. I was wondering: “where did a seemingly old tradition in the Yakovlev Design Bureau to put the striped pattern on tails of many Yakovlev planes stem from?”. Although this time I didn’t ask it from our contributor, just put it as a ‘thought aloud’. I should note, a question like that could pop up in any mind, more or less familiar with the ‘works from the Yakovlev’s stable‘, because it is a sort of known fact about this ‘design bureau’: as a ‘firm’s signature’ they’ve been using a pattern of stripes on the tail for many year, on many models.

And since then Mr. formernavalperson began surprising me, intensely denying this fact. I guess, first there’s been a bit of misunderstanding, he probably thought I meant ‘ALL the Yakovlev product had such ‘insignia’ on the tails as the ‘state registered marking‘, - as it was a case with the stripes on American military planes. But I didn’t.

A firm, that for decades bore name ‘Yakovlev’, that started as a small aircraft research, design and manufacturing outlet in an abandoned workshop (where beds used to be made), and which had grown into one of the prominent bodies in the Soviet aircraft manufacturing industry, did have a striped pattern on the aircraft tails as ‘firm’s insignia‘, a recognizable ‘touch of decoration‘, and maybe, as a component of their official ‘trade mark‘.

I have just found this image in a book on the Yakovlev’s WW-II piston fighters, it shows the ‘I-26-1‘, a very first prototype of the large Yak-1,3,7,9 family, and a caption under the picture goes:

‘The fighter was painted cherry-red, except for the red and white stripped rudder which was a trademark feature of Yakovlev aircraft in the pre-war years’.

Opening this post there’s a picture of the second prototype’s tail bearing the same ‘trademark’. And I remember that I had met many other references on this tiny subject in various Russian aviation sources over the years. For me, and for any other ‘Soviet-upbrought aviator’, it was a sort of ‘ubiquitous’ knowledge from the country’s aviation history..

(to be continued..)