Operational History
The Yak-14 filled an important role in Soviet service in the 1950s, being the only way of carrying large loads by air to remote parts of the Soviet Union without having to disassemble the loads. The usual tug was the Ilyushin Il-12.
One Yak-14 was flown to the North Pole in 1950, while another example of the glider's versatility took place in March 1954, when four Yak-14s made a long distance flight to an ice station on an ice floe drifting on the Arctic Ocean, with the supplies delivered including a large bulldozer. The gliders flew from Tula on March 10, with several stops at Omsk, Krasnoyarsk and the Schmidt Cape, on Sakhalin island in the Far East, before reaching SP-4 in early April during a heavy freeze.
A few were delivered to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s which used them under the designation NK-14.
Soviet Air Force transport gliders were gradually withdrawn from service with the arrival of turbo-prop transports like the Antonov An-24 and Antonov An-12, which entered service in the late 1950s.
Read more about this topic: Yakovlev Yak-14
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