|FIGHTER||Virtual Aircraft Museum / USSR / Russia / Yakovlev|
Korean War experience led by July 1953 to the issue of a VVS requirement for a fighter having the greatest possible performance, achieved by the highest possible ratio of thrust to weight. In the USA Lockheed sought the same objective in the F-104. Whereas the American aircraft had an extraordinarily high wing loading, so that its manoeuvrability was totally uncompetitive, care was taken in the VVS demand to call for 'good manoeuvrability in both the vertical and horizontal planes'.
Accordingly Yakoviev designed the Yak-140 to have not only the lightest possible airframe but also the largest possible wing consistent with this objective. This meant that level speed would be perhaps 150-200km/h lower than the maximum possible, but that the fighter would be far more likely to win in close manoeuvring combat. Design began immediately, and because the aircraft was so similar to the Yak-50 progress was swift.
In February 1955, immediately before flight testing of the Yak-140 began, the Minister of Aircraft Production, P V Dement'yev, announced that the project had no future, because it would be the rival MiG design that would be ordered. No explanation has so far been discovered. It appears that the MAP never issued any actual instruction ordering cancellation, but faced with the Minister's statement, Yakovlev had no option but to halt all work on the Yak-140. He was never again to produce a fighter, apart from jet-lift aircraft for the Navy.
Bill Gunston & Yefim Gordon "Yakovlev Aircraft since 1924", 1997