I-22 Iryda: polski myśliwiec, który kosztował życie pilotów i miliard złotych

In the 1970s, Poland had an ambition no NATO country would be ashamed of. Its own combat jet, its own engines, its own avionics. A country that had built aircraft before the war, which Western military intelligence agencies scrutinized with concern, wanted to prove that this tradition had not died out. The I-22 Iryda program lasted thirty years. It involved eighty Polish companies. It cost 1.2 billion zlotys. It cost three pilots their lives—two during prototype tests, one during training. Each crash was investigated by multi-person commissions that formulated dozens of hypotheses and reached no clear conclusions. Each crash gave the Ministry of National Defense an argument to slow down, trim, or postpone the program. And yet the plane flew. Instructor pilots from Dęblin wrote positive reports. India, which had previously purchased fifty Polish Iskras, watched the Iryda with interest. In 2004, an inter-ministerial expert committee appointed by the government analyzed the program and issued an official opinion: the aircraft was fit for service. In this film, we show how it happened. Decision after decision, committee after committee, argument after argument—until the national ambition was reduced to a concrete pillar on the road to Mielec and a plaque proclaiming it a symbol of the Polish aviation industry.