Klimov VK-1
Klimov VK-1 was the first
Soviet jet engine to see significant production. It was derived from the
British Rolls-Royce Nene plans for which were provided to the
USSR by the British as a goodwill gesture in what has been widely regarded as a bad move by Western military powers.
Immediately after
World War II, the Soviet Union had been working with obsolete designs based on captured German technology and the resulting engines were of poor quality. However in
1946, before the
Cold War had really begun, the new British
Labour government under the
Prime Minister,
Clement Attlee, keen to improve diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, authorised
Rolls-Royce to export 40
Rolls-Royce Nene centrifugal flow
turbojet engines. In 1958 it was discovered during a visit to
Beijing by
Whitney Straight, then deputy chairman of Rolls-Royce, that this engine had been copied without license to power the
MiG-15, first as the Klimov RD-45, and after initial problems of metallurgy forced the Soviet engineers to develop a better copy, the engine had then entered production as the Klimov VK-1. Rolls-Royce attempted to claim £207m in license fees, but without success.
The initial RD-45 proved troublesome due to Soviet inexperience with engineering and materials, but was further improved to produce the VK-1 which differed from the Nene in having larger
combustion chambers, larger
turbine, and revised airflow through the engine. The
VK-1F added the afterburner.
The VK-1 was used to power
MiG-15 and
MiG-17 fighters.
The engine featured a
centrifugal compressor unlike more progressive
axial flow compressor engines, which required aircraft housing it to be thicker than aircraft featuring axial flow compressors. The wider bodies caused more drag and this somewhat limited the performance of the MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighters when compared to other contemporary aircraft such as the
F-86 Sabre and
F-100 Super Sabre.
