Wings were braced and designed to be foldable in order to storage it inside a warship. It featured three floaters, a large central one plus two smaller ones on the wings. It was powered by a radial Shvetsov M-25 9-cylinder engine which yielded 700hp of power and was itself a copy of the American Wright R-1820. It was armed with two 7.62mm (0.3in) ShKAS machine guns placed on the upper wings plus another defensive one mounted on the observer position.
From the very beginning, the design was plagued with flaws, difficulties and handling problems. Anyway, as they lacked any other alternative to cover the role of a reconnaissance aircraft that could operate from a warship, it was placed into production.
It presented stability problems on the water while taxiing and there were also maintenance problems with the engine. As both of those problems were never really solved, the aircraft was relegated to training and secondary roles so most oftenly it was deployed from shore bases, than warships, as originally planned. Furthermore, delays on updating Navy's cruisers or building new ones, meant that suitable catapults weren't installed until 1939 approximately.
With the outbreak of the war with Germany, it was attempted to deploy the aircraft from warships but it proved to be pointless as the flaws were still there, so the chance of deploying it from warships was definitely abandoned. During the early stages of the war it was used as a shore-based reconnaissance and search/rescue aircraft in the Baltic Sea and some of them saw their floaters replaced by wheels and pressed into service armed with underwings pod machine guns to serve as improvised strike aircrafts during the Battle of Sevastopol. However, by 1942 they were definitely written off from service.
Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_Be-2
2. http://www.airpages.ru/eng/ru/kor1.shtml
No comments:
Post a Comment