Istrebitel Skladnoi

Istrebitel Skladnoi ( Russian: Истребитель складной) is a series of fighter aircraft designs that were designed, some of which were built and flown in the Soviet Union in the 1940s . The term means something like "collapsible hunter" and was coined in the 1930s by the designer Wladimir Wassiljewitsch Shevchenko .

As Istrebitel Skladnoi types were called that could be converted from a double decker to a shoulder decker . For this purpose, after the aircraft took off, the lower wings were drawn into the intended bulges in the fuselage of the machine by a pneumatic mechanism. Before that, the landing gear was also retracted pneumatically into the lower wings. The foldable part of the lower wings had a width that was smaller than the fuselage height.

The motivation for this concept was to combine the short required runway length of a double-decker with the higher maximum speed of a modern monoplane, thereby avoiding the need to lengthen the runway.

Several of these "collapsible fighters" were designed and three prototypes built:

• Nikitin-Shevchenko IS-1
• Nikitin-Shevchenko IS-2
• Nikitin-Shevchenko IS-4

The concept of the Istrebitel Skladnoi was dropped in 1942, despite some ultimately successful tests with the above prototypes, because other methods such as special flaps were developed to improve the take-off and landing characteristics of monoplane and to change the configuration of the wings Mechanism would have entailed a much higher cost of production and maintenance.