Faster Than A Comet - The INCREDIBLE FMA IA 36 Condor!

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The South American nation of Argentina may not be a country that instantly comes to mind when one thinks of aviation and cutting-edge aircraft design. However, the land of the tango and Diego Maradona has had some very interesting forays into experimental aircraft.

One of the most interesting examples of Argentinian efforts at aircraft ingenuity was the FMA IA 36 Cóndor. the Cóndor looks like it has a shell covering the back part of its fuselage. Some have likened it a snake shedding its skin. It certainly looks weird, even jarring!

There’s something nevertheless quite bold and unusual about this design, which is why I thought it deserved its own video here on Found and Explained. Let’s discover more about Argentina’s Cóndor.

The FMA IA 36 Cóndor was to have been a commercial passenger jetliner, destined to be used for mid-range, intra-continental flights by the likes of Argentina’s national airline, Aerolineas Argentinas. It was named after the Andean condor, a vulture native to Argentina and a prominent, even mythical bird in local native culture.

Its most striking feature was its multi-engine configuration. The Cóndor would house an annular inlet into which five engines or turbines would be fed. The engines, which were to be Rolls Royce “Nene II” centrifugal-flow turbojets, would be placed in a wraparound conformation that would shroud the back-end of the fuselage. The visual effect was a type of outer shell that encased the back section of the plane. It literally did look like the plane was shedding a part of itself!

Odd as it might look to us today, the plane’s engine concept was actually very much a design of its time. The 1950s, literally the dawn of the commercial jet age, saw the advent of super large composite engines that were believed to have excellent reliability. Also, it’s worth noting that the plan was to eventually replace the Cóndor’s five turbojets with lighter, more powerful and fuel-efficient engines.

Very importantly, this jetliner was believed to be able to reach a speed of 950 kilometres or 590 miles per hour. That’s impressive when compared to the Havilland Comet 3, the British commercial plane that came later in the 1950s and could achieve a top speed of 780 kilometres or 484 miles per hour. That means the FMA IA 36 Cóndor would have been almost 20% faster than the Havilland Comet 3 had the Cóndor ever been mass-produced.

The aircraft had a wingspan of 34 metres or 111.5 feet, with steeply-angled arrow wings. This wing design was thought to enhance performance and economy whilst in flight at high speeds. The plane would have an estimated range of 5,000 kilometres or 3,106 miles, making it perfect for flights between the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, and other regional destinations such as Lima, Peru, and São Paulo, Brazil.

Interior-wise, the plane would have single-aisle configuration that would only be able to accommodate 32 to 40 passengers. It was considered ideal for flying intra-continental, regional routes at that time.

We need to remember that international commercial aviation was still relatively nascent in the 1950s. As such, the emphasis was more on having relatively small numbers of passengers fly in considerable, relative comfort, even luxury, rather than the hundreds of people flying in much larger aircraft that is the norm today.

The story of the Cóndor is intricately linked to the post-war history of Argentinian aviation. The country’s Air Force began a rapid process of modernization in the aftermath of World War 2, in great part thanks to the country securing the services of a number of now-unemployed aerospace engineers and designers from Germany, Italy and France.

By the late 1940s, the government of Argentina had made significant investments in the research and development of aircraft technology. Within just a few years, Argentina was the sixth-largest manufacturer of jet aircraft technology in the world.

Work commenced on the Cóndor in late 1951 at the Fábrica Militar de Aviones or Military Aircraft Factory. The FMA was located in Córdoba, which is Argentina’s second-largest city. It was the aeronautical and arms division of the Government of Argentina, wholly subsidized by state funds. It would get sold in 1995 to Lockheed Martin and became Lockheed Martin Aircraft Argentina SA. The 1950s had undoubtedly been the division’s heyday.

By 1953, a 1:34 scale wind tunnel model of the FMA IA 36 Cóndor was built, as well as a full-scale fuselage mock-up made of wood.

However, it’s fair to say that the FMA IA 36 Cóndor was not Tank’s most shining accomplishment. There are sound reasons to say that…The Many Problems With El Cóndor

[drgeoffangel]

Maybe for the time, it was a " design too far", but today with a single hi-bypass fan engine and suitable wall insulation, it could be a very attractive concept. There have been quite a few successful aircraft designs with an engine in the rear, or part of the main fuselage structure behind the passengers, so to speak, of which the Trident springs to mind. The main advantage of this design is the fact that you do not have the additional mass of engine pylons, and the drag of the engines /pylons themselves. As an executive jet with as i say extensive noise and vibration insulation, using modern day materials, a plane of this design could be very fast and more importantly, very cool!! more an executive play thing!!

[HeadPack]

Tank was a fine thinker. Today, this may be an approach for a single engine large turbo fan plane. Apart from that, it did not look like Tank's team planned to seat passengers in the area of the engines, but in front of them.

[hachipanki]

As an Argentinian who is in love with aviation, it is weird for me that i have never heard about this thing, i know about the Pulqui 1 and 2, and lots of other planes designed in my country, but this is awesome!

[Sir_Uncle_Ned]

This kind of design would make a very striking private jet in this day and age, with no obvious engines it would draw attention everywhere it went.

[Robwantsacurry]

I've recently thought that a design like this would be ideal for a single ultra-high bypass ratio engine for a regional airliner. FOD ingestion would probably be an issue though.

[SiberiaMCNuggets]

I drew a plane like that but as a sci fi plane "concept" on my high school notebook, and I never knew this plane until now, just saying. Thank you for this video

[lesliereissner]

Another great video, the extremely strange pronunciations of "DeHavilland" aside. The noise of those early turbojets would have been unbearable positioned inside the fuselage but as Herr Dr. ing. Tank was used to military aviation that was probably not very significant. In terms of early jetliners, the DeHavilland Comet only flew 13 days ahead of the Avro Canada Jetliner, a fascinating project that is pretty forgotten in comparison to the overrated Avro Arrow, and would be worth a feature on its own.

[Argentvs]

Major mistake here, the Pulqui I was a design of an FMA team under a design office lead by French engineer Dewoitine. Tank was in Germany when the IAe. 27 first flew.
The Pulqui II was already in design when Tank was contracted by the FMA and took over the development behind doors with his own team applying his experience, much to the dislike of Argentine engineers. Fun fact, when he left, the project improved as the local team solved his errors that cause the first prototypes to crash.

Also the "courtesy" part of the British wasn't courtesy but DEBT, London had a 19, 8 billion (fixed at current value) to Argentina by 1945 in supplies delivered during WWII. They were broke and couldn't pay, so they offered licenses, weapons, machine tools and obsolete scrap machines to pay off (they defaulted and Argentina condoned half the debt even). One of the licenses were the RR Nene turbine, which was a dead end and the licensed because they were moving to axial flow turbines. The turbine was the only one available in Argentina then it was chosen for the project in that arrangement.

[ecovictor]

Nice video. As an argentine I love to see some designs from my country.
But, there are some mistakes.
First: I.Ae. 27 Pulqui I was designed by Émile Dewoitine. The one designed by Kurt Tank was the I.Ae. 33 Pulqui II (Based on the Ta 183, but modified to use an english Nene II engines).
Second: the Revolucion Libertadora (coup against Peron) was in 1955, not 1958.
After the war Argentine recieve no more than five Nene engines from England. At that time we couldn't reverse engineer them like the russians did (Klimov VK-1). This plane would have used them all. This is only one of the many reasons this plane could never have been mass produced in Argentina.
The same goes for the Pulqui 2. Only five prototypes were ever built, one reserved for static testing, and four flying prototypes, all of them practically handmade.

[SmartassX]

Surely the windowless back of the cabin was intended for luggage only. And why would it be hot during flight with all those ventilation gaps? Had they found a problem like that, the next model of it would simply have had wider gaps.

There are always some problems to work out with completely new designs.

[skenzyme]

This airliner merely suffers from chronic boundary-layer indigestion. Just needs some aerospace-grade Pepto Bismol. 👍

[ivu-feik]

I am an argentinian pasionate about our historic national aerospace development, but let me tell you, I've never heard about the IA36 Condor. Seems very strange how the pane is called the same way as the secret supersonic missile program. I hope to see more Argentinian aviation videos, you could even make one about the "Narangero" IA 38 made by one of the Horten brothers and was actually built and used. It was eventually destroyed in a fire, but a video about it would definetly be interesting!

[scubastevedan]

You lost me at "Dehelevand" comet, rather than DeHavilland. I couldn't stop laughing after that.

[marclagalle]

Pointless questions as to the 'flaws'. The early British turbojets were centrifugal designs, and quite chubby - the passenger cabin could not have had 5 of these beasts around the outside of them. The passenger cabin seats would probably have ended where the last row of windows with the rear pressure bulkhead being not too much further aft of that.

[daemonslayer]

I'm fairly certain that it was Emile Dewoitine, and not Kurt Tank, who designed the FMA I.Ae. 27 Pulqui I. The Pulqui I had such terrible performance (Emil Dewoitine did not take the transition from propeller to turbine power very well) that the project was scrapped and the FMA I.Ae. 33 Pulqui II, an entirely new design by Kurt Tank, was selected instead. The only commonality the Pulqui I and Pulqui II shared was the name "Pulqui" itself.

[Dronte]

"-That was cute" (Reimar Horten after the construction of the I.Ae. 38 Naranjero prototype, a four-engine flying wing specialized in the transport of ... oranges)
Greetings from Argentina from a fan of unbuilt aircraft projects.

[robertmiles]

You go on for awhile about the problems with the plane being passengers sitting in the engine section, but I think it's very obvious the passenger compartment doesn't extend past the wings.

[nong]

I also imagine, with the engines incased into the fuselage lake that, that maintenance would be a nightmare. It's one of the main reason low-wing designs with underslung engines have always been so popular in the industry, so a plane with such hard-to-reach mechanicals would likely turn off a lot of airlines.

[emaheiwa]

Fan from Argentina here. Watching your videos since you had around 20k subs. 👏🏻🍻 Thank you

[claytonpozzer]

I think the design is very good, today we can have a single engine (with large fan, hi bypass) in same fuselage configuration. The air flow around the fuselage is optimized, increasing the eficience and the modern turbo fan engines have extremely low cases of failures. Cheap, efficient.