General Vows Nation's Proud Flying Heritage Will Fly Again

Vladimir Mikhailov is a man with a mission. But for the chief of staff of the powerful air forces of the Russian Federation, it might not be the mission you'd expect. His mission is to honor the proud history of Russian aviation, by restoring it to fly, and where necessary, recreating it.

There were some parts of the Soviet Union nobody wants to see again: show trials, purges, midnight disappearances, mass graves. But the Soviet Union did make some remarkable strides in aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, especially in such fields as long-range flight.

Like Lindbergh, Nungesser, and Udet in their various lands, Soviet pilots like Valery Chkalov became household words to aviation buffs.

But as each new record fell to a newer record, as today's advanced technology became tomorrow's forgotten, eclipsed or backward stuff, many rare prototypes were pushed off into hangar corners, worn out as hacks, or destroyed in the German invasion of 1942, which devastated most of industrial Russia.

Mikhaiilov plans to change all that. "We are planning complete restoration of the fleet of the prewar, WWII and postwar planes," he told a press conference at Monino a week ago, as reported by the Russian press agency, Novosti. "For instance, veteran planes are being recreated at the Chkalov aircraft production enterprise in Novosibirsk."

Mikhailov is not without his critics. A Russian aviator told us that the general means well, but lacks the resources. And the task has already had its first setback: as previously reported in Aero-News, a fire ignited by a welder destroyed a building at the Air Forces Museum at Monino that was home to a collection of 20th Century aero engines, and worse, contained tens of thousands of irreplaceable documents. The best the firefighters could do was keep the damage contained to that single building.

The recent fire at Monino illustrates Mikhailov's problem. The whole museum -- much like the Russian Air Force as a whole -- is looking pretty careworn these days.

But there's not denying that, when properly supported, the craftsmen at the Chkalov plant in Novosibirsk do outstanding work. Among the airplanes restored there are the Polikarpov I-16s operated by the Alpine Fighter Museum in New Zealand and by the Commemorative Air Force here in the USA.

(The plant is named after the same Chkalov mentioned above, who was known world-wide for record-setting distance flights. Chkalov himself died testing a new fighter in 1938, which could happen to any test pilot; Stalin supposedly had the project engineers shot, which could only have happened in Russia).

FMI: www.mil.ru