Rogožarski IK-3

Rogožarski IK-3
Rogožarski IK-3
Role	Fighter
Manufacturer	Rogožarski A.D
Designer	Kosta Sivčev, Ljubomir Ilić, Slobodan Zrnić
First flight	late May 1938
Introduction	late March 1940
Primary user	Royal Yugoslav Air Force
Number built	12

The Rogožarski IK-3 was a 1930s Yugoslav low-wing, monoplane, single-seat fighter with retractable landing gear, designed by Ljubomir Ilić, Kosta Sivčev and Slobodan Zrnić as a successor to the Ikarus IK-2 fighter. Its armament consisted of a hub-firing 20 mm (0.79 in) and two fuselage-mounted synchronised machine guns. It was considered comparable to foreign aircraft such as the Messerschmitt Bf 109E and came into service in 1940. The prototype crashed during testing, but a total of twelve production aircraft had been delivered by July 1940.

Six IK-3s were serviceable when the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia began on 6 April 1941. All six were in service with the 51st Independent Fighter Group at Zemun near the capital, Belgrade. Pilots flying the IK-3 claimed to have shot down 11 aircraft during the 11-day conflict. According to one account, to prevent them from falling into German hands, the surviving aircraft and incomplete airframes were destroyed by their crews and factory staff. Another account indicates that one aircraft survived the invasion but it was later destroyed through sabotage. The IK-3 design was used as the basis for the post-war Yugoslav-built Ikarus S-49 fighter.

In the late 1920s, the Royal Yugoslav Air Force (Serbo-Croatian: Vazduhoplovstvo vojske Kraljevine Jugoslavije, VVKJ) and the Royal Aero Club of Yugoslavia helped send aspiring aeronautical engineers to France to develop their knowledge. It was intended that after this advanced training, they would return to Yugoslavia and be offered specialist roles in the VVKJ or in the aeronautical industry. Ljubomir Ilić and Kosta Sivčev went through this program but, when they returned to Yugoslavia, both were employed in administrative work. Frustrated by this, they decided in 1931 to design a replacement for the Czechoslovakian-built Avia BH-33E biplane fighter, then in service with the VVKJ. Working in a basement in Belgrade, and later in Ilić's apartment in Novi Sad, they secretly devoted their spare time to work on their design. They originally planned a low-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear. However, contemporary thinking within the VVKJ led them to evolve their initial ideas into a strut-braced gull-wing monoplane armed with a hub-firing and fuselage-mounted synchronised machine guns. The design concept for what became the Ikarus IK-2 was submitted to the VVKJ on 22 September 1933. With this work completed, Ilić and Sivčev had time to start preliminary development of a new low-wing monoplane that could better meet and defeat the high performance bomber prototypes then in development by potential adversaries.

...
Wikipedia