ZIL-4906 Sinyaya Ptitsa

The ZIL-4906 "Sinyaya Ptitsa" (Blue Bird) is a six-wheeled amphibious vehicle from the ZIL special design bureau (SKB), led by Vitaly Grachev. It was built to recover Soviet cosmonauts and their descent capsules wherever they came down. Development traced back to the Voskhod-2 landing of 1965, when Belyayev and Leonov came down far off course in the snowbound taiga of the Perm region and had to ski out to a clearing to be picked up. Sergei Korolev then asked Grachev for a vehicle that no terrain could stop. The PEU-1 of the late 1960s came first, and the Blue Bird complex followed in 1975.

The 490 complex

The search-and-rescue complex 490 entered air-force service in the early 1980s. Each team had three machines: a cargo ZIL-4906 with a crane for lifting the capsule, a ZIL-49061 with an air-conditioned passenger cabin with room for the three cosmonauts to lie down and a doctor, and the screw-propelled ZIL-29061, carried on the cargo vehicle, for ground that wheels cannot cross. The whole set could be flown in by Il-76 transport aircraft or slung under a helicopter.

Design

A glassfibre displacement hull sits on a steel frame. The radio-navigation equipment and a four-seat cab are in the nose, the engine is behind the front axle, and the rest is cargo space. The three axles are equally spaced at 2,400 mm, so the vehicle can cross ditches more than 1.5 m wide and climb steps up to 1 m high. The front and rear axles steer, giving the 9 m vehicle a turning radius of only 10 m. Power came from a 150 hp ZIL V8 petrol engine, or a 136 hp diesel. A five-speed gearbox and two-speed transfer case give ten forward gears, driving each side of the vehicle separately through hub reduction gears. Suspension is independent with torsion bars, and the vehicle has disc brakes and tyre-pressure control. Two propellers drive it in the water. The ZIL-49061 weighs about 9.5 tonnes, carries just over 2 tonnes, reaches 80 km/h on land and about 9 km/h afloat, and has a range of 1,250 km.

Production and later use

According to one article, only about 20 were built before production ended in 1991. From 1995 a plant at Pravdinsk in Balakhna, Nizhny Novgorod region, assembled land-only derivatives. Blue Birds were still on recovery duty in the 2000s, and some have passed into private hands as campers, crane carriers and collectors' vehicles. The archive's list of surviving vehicles by number reflects this.