Antanas Gustaitis

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Antanas Gustaitis.jpg

Antanas Gustaitis (born March 26, 1898 in Obelinė , Wolost Sasnava , Marijampolė district , † October 16, 1941 in Moscow ) was a Lithuanian military pilot, brigadier general , aircraft designer and chess player .

Life

His father was the farmer Kazimieras Gustaitis and his mother Petronėlė Gustaitienė. Antanas graduated from elementary school in Marijampolė and then attended high school in Marijampolė . In May 1916 he graduated from the Yaroslavl grammar school and studied at the Institute of Linking Road Engineering in Petersburg . In 1917 he completed the first annual course and was drafted into the Russian army. He studied at the Artillery School in Saint Petersburg and served in the Lithuanian Army from 1919 .

In 1922 Antanas Gustaitis became a Lithuanian chess master.

In 1925 Gustaitis began to design aircraft and was the first to design the ANBO-I sport aircraft . After its successful testing in the summer of the same year, Gustaitis went to France and began studying at the University of Aeronautics in Paris, during which his second aircraft, the ANBO-II , was built in 1927 . When he returned to Lithuania as an aviation engineer, he designed various types of aircraft for the Lithuanian Air Force from 1928 , which were known as the ANBO series, built in the Kaunas aircraft workshops and mostly used for school purposes. In 1929 Gustaitis took over the management of the aircraft workshop. In 1932 his best-known construction, the reconnaissance aircraft ANBO-IV , appeared, of which three copies made a tour under Gustaitis' leadership to various capitals of Europe, including London, Paris, Rome and Vienna, from 25 to 29 July 1934, and more than Covered 10,000 kilometers. Its last construction before the occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union was the ANBO-VIII .

On November 23, 1937, he was promoted to brigadier general. From 1941 Gustaitis taught as a lecturer at the building faculty of the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas .

On March 4, 1941 Gustaitis took the train on the Kaunas – Alytus route . He wanted to reach the state border and emigrate to the west. Not far from the Šeštokai train station , Gustaitis was arrested by Soviet border guards while he was continuing his journey in a horse-drawn carriage. After a short imprisonment in Kaunas Prison , he was brought to Moscow on March 7, 1941 . On June 27, 1941, he was charged with espionage and founding an anti-Soviet underground movement. Sentenced to death by a Soviet court, Gustaitis was shot dead on October 16, 1941.

Awards

Web links

Commons : Antanas Gustaitis  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 24, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Marat Chairulin: The ANBO aircraft and Lithuania small air fighting force . In: Fliegerrevue . No. 4/1993 , p. 34/35 .
  3. ↑ Peter Alles-Fernandez (Ed.): Aircraft from A to Z. Bernard & Graefe, Koblenz 1987, ISBN 3-7637-5904-2 , p. 89/90
  4. ↑ Order of the White Lion ( Memento from December 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Gustaitis, Antanas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian military pilot, brigadier general, aircraft designer and chess player
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Obelinė , Sasnava , Marijampolė district
DATE OF DEATH October 16, 1941
Place of death Moscow