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Rockets and People
After the spirit of romance and creative enthusiasm that had permeated the
atmosphere in the Bolkhovitinov KB, work in the KOSTR seemed boring and
commonplace. However, here I was schooled in the discipline of designing for
large-scale series production and also in the system for drafting management.This
experience, which no institute in the world provides, was very beneficial to me
when we were putting our first missiles into series production.And of course there
were flight incidents, which injected a little excitement into our monotonous
work with series production drawings. LIS had not run out of practical jokers
hatching risky schemes. I will tell you about one such incident.
The Spanish Civil War began in the summer of 1936. During this conflict the
Soviet Union rendered assistance to the army of Spain’s antifascist Republican
government with military advisors, “volunteers,” and weapons.The Republican
Army did not actually have its own air force. German and Italian pilots flying
Messerschmitts and Junkers fought on the side of General Franco. Soviet volunteers
in Chaikas (I-153s) and Ishaks (I-16s) fought on the Republican side. 3
These were fighters produced by Polikarpov in the early 1930s.They were inferior
to the Messerschmitt-109 in speed and weaponry. Factory No. 22 received
a combat assignment to strengthen the Republican Air Force by increasing SB
production and manufacturing dozens of SBs for Spain.This required the aircraft
to be modified so that it could be packed in dismantled form into a large
wooden container, and upon arrival on site, be quickly assembled under field
conditions. This was a super rush job. During the flight acceptance tests, problems
arose that threatened to hold up the airplanes’ shipment to Odessa, where
they would go by sea to Spain.
One of the military representatives particularly annoyed LIS when filling out
the acceptance documents. His formal attitude and constant nitpicking even infuriated
Tarasevich, who appealed to the chief of military acceptance.“Which one of
us is the saboteur?”Tarasevich asked,“I, who was convicted in 1930, or your military
engineer second class, whose whims keep our planes from leaving for Spain?”
The LIS degenerates and hooligans, as they used to call them in KOSTR,
thought up a risky scheme.They proposed that the capricious military rep himself
take a seat in the navigator’s cockpit and satisfy himself that firing from the forward
firing position machine gun in flight was completely trouble-free.The military rep
really did fire in flight, having no qualms about wasting cartridges, and he reported
to the pilot over the intercom that he was accepting the aircraft, and they could
now go in for a landing.Then the pilot suddenly announced that the landing gear
lowering device had failed. He would be forced to land the plane on its belly with
the landing gear retracted. In this case, the rep could not stay in the forward cockpit.
During landing it was certain that “in the best case scenario your legs will be
injured, and in the worst . . . .”To make a long story short, the pilot made a deci-
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3. Chaika (seagull) and Ishak (donkey).