Cuban sector, southern Russia, April 1943.
The mud of the airfield at Crossnadar is thick enough to swallow a boot, but the sky above is a crisp, merciless blue.
Senior Lieutenant Victor Petrov climbs into the cockpit of his fighter.
It is not a yak.
It is not a lavagekin.
It is a piece of American lend lease metal that the RAF rejected and the USAAF pilots call the iron dog.
It is the Bellp39 Arab.
To the uninitiated, the P39 is a freak of engineering.
The engine, an Allison V1710 liquid cooled V12, is not in the nose.
It is sitting directly behind Petrov’s spine encased in the fuselage like a backpack.
A 10-ft drive shaft runs between his legs, spinning at 3,000 RPM, connecting the engine to the propeller.
In the nose where the engine should be sits a massive 37 Oldsmobile T9 cannon.
The design was meant to center the mass to make the plane agile, but it created a monster.
The P39 has a center of gravity CG that is dangerously aft.
If you pull the stick too hard or if the ammunition drum in the nose empties, shifting the weight even further back, the plane doesn’t just stall.
It tumbles.
It flips and do end like a thrown hammer.
The Americans call it the flat spin.
The manual says it is unreoverable.
The manual says if you enter a tumble below 10,000 ft, you bail out.
Petrov knows the manual, but he also knows that the Luftwaffer is waiting at 12,000 ft.
The line between a fatal design flaw and a game-changing tactic is often drawn by the pilot who refuses to eject.
If you want to uncover the engineering secrets of WWI’s most misunderstood aircraft and the men who flew them, smash that like button and subscribe.
You won’t find this story in the American flight manuals.
Petrov squadron takes off.
The tricycle landing gear, another P39 oddity, retracts with a thud.
The Allison engine roars, deafening inside the corridor style cockpit.
The P39 is fast at low altitude, a shark in the shallows.
But as they climb past 10,000 ft, the lack of a turbocharger makes the engine weakabra gasps for air.
Bandits hike covering the bombers.
It is a swarm of Messersmidt BF-1009 G2s.
They are diving out of the sun.
Their Daimlerbent engines screaming.
They have the energy advantage.
They have the altitude.
Petrov breaks right.
His wingman Sasha breaks left.
A BF9 latches onto Petrov.
The German pilot is good.
He uses the vertical.
He dives, fires, and zooms back up, exploiting the P39’s poor climb rate.
Petrov is trapped in a defensive spiral, bleeding energy with every turn.
The German comes down again.
This time he commits.
He is going for the kill.
Petrov watches the mirror.
The yellow nose of the Messersmid grows larger.
400 yd, 300 yd.
Tracers zip past the canopy.
Petrov is desperate.
He hauls back on the control stick with both hands.
He is trying to force the P39 into a tight turn, trying to get inside the Germans radius.
He pulls too hard.
He exceeds the critical angle of attack.
The laminer flow wings lose their grip on the air.
In a normal plane, the nose would drop.
But the P39 is not a normal plane.
The heavy engine behind Petrov acts like a pendulum weight.
The nose doesn’t drop.
It snaps up.
Wham! The violence is instantaneous.
The P39 departs controlled flight.
It flips onto its back, then continues rotating pitch-wise.
It is tumbling and overend.
The horizon spins wildly.
Sky, ground, sky, ground.
Petrov is thrown against his harness.
The blood rushes to his head, then his feet, then his head again.
He is inside a washing machine set to spin cycle.
I’ve killed myself, Petrov thinks.
I’ve tumbled it.
The manual says, “Neutralize controls, prey.” But behind him, the German pilot witnesses something impossible.
The BF 109 pilot is lining up a deflection shot on a turning target.
He expects the American plane to continue its smooth arc.
Instead, the P39 stops flying.
It transforms from an airplane into a chaotic spinning object.
It puts on the brakes so hard that the airframe groans.
The German pilot cannot adjust.
His closure rate is 350 m.
The P39 has virtually stopped in midair.
The German overshoots.
He screams past Petrov’s tumbling aircraft, missing a collision by feet.
The wake turbulence from the German plane rocks the P39, adding to the chaos.
Petrov is still tumbling.
He is falling at 4,000 ft per minute.
The ground is coming up.
He fights the panic.
He remembers a rumor, a whisper from the test pilots.
The rudder, the spin is flat.
You need to drop the nose.
Petrov slams the throttle shut to kill the torque.
He pushes the stick fully forward, trying to break the stall.
Nothing happens.
The elevator is blanketed by the turbulent wake of the wing.
He kicks the rudder into the spin, then abruptly against it.
The violent yaw disrupts the airflow.
The nose drops.
The tumble turns into a dive.
The airflow reattaches to the wings.
The stick goes heavy again.
Petrov pulls out at 3,000 ft.
The G-forces crush him.
The rivets on the wings scream, but the wings hold.
He levels out.
He is shaking.
He is covered in sweat.
He looks up.
The German pilot is circling high above, looking for the wreckage.
He assumes the P39 spun into the ground.
Petrov realizes what just happened.
He made a rookie error.
He induced the dreaded tumble.
But it saved his life.
The tumble didn’t just spoil the Germans aim.
It made the P39 invisible to the laws of ballistics.
No gun site in the world can track a plane that is flipping end over end.
Petrov looks at the heavy 37 cannon in the nose.
He looks at the engine temperature gauge.
You are a beast, he whispers to the plane.
But maybe, maybe you are my beast.
The engineering officers of the VVS, Soviet Air Force, analyze the P39 differently than the Americans.
The Americans see the aft center of gravity as a flaw.
They put lead ballast in the nose to fix it.
They tell pilots to fly gentle.
Petrov stands in the briefing room with his regiment commander, the legendary Alexander Priskin.
Historically, Pakrishkin was the master of the P39.
Petrov explains the tumble.
It stopped, comrade commander, Petrov says using his hands to mimic the flip.
It acted like a wall.
The Fritz flew right past me.
Pakrishkin listens.
He is a tactician.
He treats air combat like chess.
He knows the P39 is treacherous, but he also knows it has a sensitive trigger.
The Americans call it instability, Pakrishkin muses.
But instability is just maneuverability waiting to be controlled.
If the plane wants to flip, why do we fight it? Why not let it flip when we want it to? They start to experiment.
They take the iron dog up over the Caucus’ mountains.
They strip the American ballast from the nose.
They make the plane even more unstable.
Petrov learns the mechanics.
The maneuver starts with a deception.
You lure the enemy onto your tail.
You let him get close, dangerously close.
You wait until he is committed to the shot.
Then you pull.
You snatch the stick back with a violence that would snap the wings off a Spitfire.
At the same time, you cut the throttle.
The P39 rears up.
It enters the bell, a precursor to the modern culit or Cobra maneuver.
The nose rises past vertical to 110°.
The plane is flying backward for a split second.
The enemy overshoots, but the recovery is the hard part.
If you let it go too far, you enter the flat spin.
You have to catch it at the apex.
You have to slam the stick forward and power up exactly when the nose drops through the horizon.
It is a dance on the edge of a razor.
One second too long and you die in the crash.
One second too short and the enemy shoots you while you hang there.
Petrov practices until his arms ache.
He learns to feel the onset of the tumble.
The way the stick goes light.
The way the vibration changes pitch.
He calls it the cobra strike.
May 1943.
The air war over the Cuban bridge head is the fiercest of the eastern front.
The sky is a meat grinder.
Petrov leads a flight of four P39s.
They are hunting stucas.
Fighters 109.
6:00.
Six Messids bounce them.
The Germans are aggressive.
They know the P39s are vulnerable to diving attacks.
A 109 G6 divies on Petrov.
The German fires his 20 cannon.
Bang bang.
A shell hits Petrov’s tail, shredding the elevator fabric.
Petrov is hurt.
The plane is sluggish.
He can’t run.
The 109 is faster.
The German pulls up, loops over, and comes down for the finish.
He is confident.
He sees the damaged tail.
Petrov waits.
He watches the German’s nose light up with muzzle flashes.
Now Petrov grunts.
He rips the stick back.
The P39 groans.
The nose snaps up violently.
The plane pitches past the vertical.
It acts as a massive air bra.
The German pilot is shocked.
The target has suddenly transformed into a vertical wall of aluminum.
The closure rate becomes impossible.
The German yanks his stick to avoid a collision.
He zooms underneath Petrov’s belly.
As the German passes, Petrov kicks the rudder.
The P39 hanging in the stall pivots on its tail.
The heavy engine swings the rear around.
Petrov slams the throttle forward.
The torque bites.
The nose drops.
Suddenly, Petrov is diving and the German is in front of him.
The German has lost his energy in the evasion.
He is climbing out slow and straight.
Petrov lines up the shot.
The 37 cannon is a slow firing weapon.
Thump, thump, thump.
He fires three rounds.
They look like glowing softballs.
The second round hits the Messormidt’s wing route.
The effect of a 37 high explosive shell is devastating.
The German wing doesn’t just break, it vaporizes.
The BF 109 disintegrates in a cloud of fire and metal.
Target destroyed.
Petrov radios.
He looks at his hands.
They are trembling.
He just used a maneuver that is technically impossible in a plane that is technically broken to kill a superior enemy.
The accident has become a tactic.
The Luftwafa pilots begin to report strange behavior from the Soviet Arabras.
They report that the planes are possessed.
They report that the Russians are flying with a suicidal disregard for aerodynamics.
Beware the cobra,” a German ace writes in his diary.
“It does not fly like a plane.
It flies like a brick that hates you.” The Soviets refine the tactic.
They develop the Cuban ladder, a vertical formation tactic, and integrate the tumble as a defensive last resort.
Petrov becomes an ace.
10 kills, 15 kills.
He paints a red star on his nose for each one.
But the P39 is taking a toll on him.
The drive shaft vibration is constant.
It numbs his legs.
The fumes from the nose cannon fill the cockpit with cordite smoke every time he fires.
And the tumble is dangerous.
July 1943.
Petrov is tired.
The squadron has lost three men this week to flat spins.
Not to the Germans, to the plane.
They pulled too hard, tumbled, and couldn’t recover.
The line between the trick and the accident is vanishingly thin.
Petrov is on patrol near the Black Sea coast.
He spots a lone fuckwolf 190.
It is a jabastafle, a fighter bomber variant.
Petrov dies.
The FW90 sees him and jettison its bomb.
The German pilot turns into the fight.
It is a duel, one-on-one.
The FW90 is a radial engine beast.
It rolls faster than the P39.
It is tough.
They enter a scissors maneuver, weaving back and forth, trying to force the other to overshoot.
The FW90 is winning.
The German pilot cuts the throttle, forcing Petrov to fly past.
Petrov finds himself in front, the nightmare position.
The FW 190 lines up the shot.
Petrov knows he can’t outturn the wolf.
He has to use the tumble, but he is low 2,000 ft.
The manual screams, “Do not tumble below 10,000.
If he tumbles now, he might not have the altitude to recover.
He will crash.
If he doesn’t tumble, the German will shred him with four 20 cannons.” Petrov chooses the crash.
At least it’s his choice.
He pulls the stick back.
The P39 snaps.
It flips over.
The world spins.
The green of the forest fills the canopy.
The German pilot sees the maneuver.
He thinks the Russian has lost it.
He is going in.
The German watches, fascinated.
He stops firing.
He waits for the impact.
Petrov hangs in the straps.
He is falling fast.
1,500 ft.
1,000 ft.
He slams the stick forward.
Recover.
Recover.
The nose won’t drop.
The spin is flat.
The center of gravity is locking him in the death spiral.
Power.
Petrov screams.
He jams the throttle to war emergency power.
The Allison screams.
The torque hits the airframe.
The sudden torque twists the plane sideways.
It disrupts the stable flat spin.
The nose dips.
500 ft.
The trees are rushing up.
Petrov sees individual branches.
He pulls back gently.
The P39 shutters.
It pulls out of the dive.
His belly scoop clips the top of a pine tree.
Leaves and branches slam into the radiator intake.
He levels out at 50 ft.
He is alive.
He looks back.
The German pilot, fixated on watching the crash, has followed him down.
The German was so sure the P39 was dead that he forgot to fly his own plane.
The German is too low, too fast.
He sees Petrov level out.
He tries to pull up.
But the FW 190 is heavy.
It mushes.
The German plane slams into the forest floor.
A massive fireball erupts behind Petrov.
Petrov flies through the smoke.
He didn’t shoot.
He didn’t have to.
He used the ground as his wingman.
He lands back at the base with pine branches stuck in his air intake.
The mechanic, Ivan, looks at the branches.
He looks at Petrov.
You are trimming the trees again.
Lieutenant, I was gardening, Petrov says, his voice hollow.
He climbs out of the cockpit, his legs give way.
He sits on the wings shaking.
He realizes that the trick is not a trick.
It is a pact with the devil.
You trade control for survival.
But one day the devil will collect.
The war ends.
Petrov survives.
He finishes with 22 kills.
Most of them in the P39.
The Americans scrap the P39s.
They hate them.
They melt them down and build refrigerators.
They forget the iron dog.
But the Soviets remember Petrov stays in the air force.
He becomes an instructor.
He teaches the new generation of jet pilots.
He tells them about the P39.
He tells them about the aft center of gravity.
Stability is comfort.
Petro teaches.
Instability is freedom.
A stable plane goes where you point it.
An unstable plane goes where you think it.
In the 1970s, Soviet engineers at the Sukcoy Design Bureau are working on a new fighter, the Sue27 Flanker.
They are studying aerodynamics.
They look at the old reports from the great patriotic war.
They look at the combat journals of pilots like Pakrishkin and Petrov.
They see the descriptions of the bell maneuver, the sudden deceleration, the pitchup.
They decide to build a plane that is inherently unstable.
They use relaxed static stability and flybywire computers to control it.
In 1989 at the Leberet Air Show in Paris, a Soviet test pilot named Victor Pugashev takes off in Ensu 27.
He is flying at 300 m.
Suddenly, he pulls the stick back.
The massive jet rears up.
The nose passes the vertical.
It hangs in the air, belly forward like a cobra striking.
It stops.
The crowd gasps.
The western experts think the plane has stalled.
They think it is going to crash.
Then Pugashv pushes the nose down.
The jet accelerates away.
It is the Pugashv’s Cobra.
The world calls it a new invention, a miracle of modern engineering.
But somewhere in Russia, an old man watches the news on a grainy television.
Victor Petrov is 80 years old.
His hands are arthritic.
He walks with a cane.
He watches the Sue 27 perform the maneuver.
He sees the violence of the pitchup.
He sees the sudden deceleration.
He smiles.
I know that move, he whispers.
He remembers the mud of the Cuban.
He remembers the smell of the Allison engine.
He remembers the German pilot flying past his canopy, eyes wide with terror.
“It is not a cobra,” Petrrov says to the empty room.
“It is an Arakabra.” “The legacy of the P39 is not in the history books of the West.
It is hidden in the DNA of modern super maneuverability.” The rookie error, the accidental tumble caused by a heavy engine in the wrong place, taught the world that aerodynamic instability could be a weapon.
It taught pilots that the sky has no rails, that the only limit is the structural strength of the wings and the courage of the man holding the stick.
Petrov dies in 1999.
He is buried with his medals.
On his tombstone, there is an engraving of a P39.
It is not flying straight.
It is nose up, tumbling, defying gravity.
The inscription reads, “He fell with style.” The P39 Aracabra was a flawed machine.
It killed many of its own pilots.
But in the hands of the masters, the Iron Dog didn’t just bite.
It danced.
And the accident of its design became the deadliest trick in the sky.
