Design and Development
The Pe-2 was designed in a prison camp (sharashka); Vladimir Petlyakov had been arrested and imprisoned in 1937 for allegedly deliberately delaying design work on the Tupolev ANT-42 bomber. In the sharashka, Petlyakov was put in charge of a team to develop a high-altitude fighter escort for the ANT-42 under the designation VI-100. The first of two prototypes flew on December 22, 1939 and was a very sophisticated aircraft for its time, featuring a pressurised cabin, all-metal construction, superchargers and many electrically-actuated systems. The prototypes proved so pleasing that production was ordered almost immediately. It is said that Petlyakov and his team could see the VI-100 prototype from their prison as it was put through its paces for the crowds watching the annual May Day parade in 1940.
Just as production was ready to begin, the air force ordered a re-design of the aircraft. The value of tactical bombing had just been displayed by the Luftwaffe in the Blitzkrieg, and the need for such an aircraft suddenly became much more important than the need for a high-altitude escort fighter. Petlyakov's team was given 45 days to redesign their aircraft as a dive bomber. Cabin pressurization and superchargers were deleted, dive brakes and a bombardiers position were added, and other aerodynamic refinements. A fuselage bomb-bay was added, along with smaller bays in each engine nacelle. The aircraft was initially designated PB-100, but Joseph Stalin was impressed enough with Petlyakov to free him, and his name was permitted to be used in the aircraft's designation. The first aircraft flew on December 15, 1940, rushed through production without a prototype under severe threats from Stalin if a Pe-2 did not fly by the end of the year. Deliveries to combat units began the following Spring.
While the Pe-2 generally featured favorable flying characteristics when airborne, it took a good amount of force to pull the elevators up to get the plane rotated off the runway during takeoff. Russian night bombing missions often flew with female pilots and some of the women were not strong enough to get the airplane airborne by themselves. When such a situation occurred, the procedure was to have one of the crew get behind the pilot's seat and wrap her arms around the control wheel and help the pilot pull the wheel back. Once the aircraft was airborne, the crew member returned to her duties and the pilot continued to fly the plane without assistance. Its armament was clearly insufficient, however. The dorsal ShKAS machine gun was inadequate. It had a high rate of fire but it also had 48 ways of jamming. The ventral Berezin UB had a very limited field of view and at the beginning was unreliable too. To give more protection, another ShKAS was added that could be moved between sockets on both sides of the fuselage and, in emergency, the gunner could fire upwards, but in this case he had to be quite strong to keep it in his arms. To improve the bomber's defences, a dorsal Berezin UBT 12,7 mm was mounted. This modification was reported to increase the life expectancy of a Pe-2 from 20 sorties to 54.
Read more about this topic: Petlyakov Pe-2
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