Mikhail Wassiljewitsch Wodopyanow
Mikhail Vodopyanov ( Russian Михаил Васильевич Водопьянов ; born November 6 . Jul / 18th November 1899 greg. In Studjonka (in Lipetsk ); † 11. August 1980 in Moscow ) was a Soviet pilot .
He was one of seven pilots who evacuated the shipwrecked crew of the steamer Cheliuskin , which sank in the Arctic Ocean in February 1934, from an ice floe. As a result of this achievement, the Hero of the Soviet Union award was donated and the aviators were the first to be given in the history of the USSR . On May 21, 1937, he was the first person to land an airplane at the geographic North Pole .
Life
Mikhail Wodopyanov joined the Red Army in 1919 and took part in the Russian Civil War. He did his job in a squadron equipped with Ilya Muromets bombers , initially as a carter, later as a driver. At the age of 26 he qualified as an on-board mechanic and flew missions to combat swarms of locusts in the Syr Darja area. In 1929 he acquired his flight license and worked for a while as a pilot in civil aviation, initially as a pilot again to control locusts in the Kuban region , then as a long - distance pilot in the Far East on the Khabarovsk - Sakhalin line . During this time he completed his first long-distance flight of 41 hours from Moscow to Khabarovsk in a W 33 . Wodopyanow also took part in an expedition on the Sea of Okhotsk on behalf of the Fisheries Institute, where his task was to track down seal colonies. When it was over, he flew the Moscow – Leningrad route and delivered printing matrices on behalf of Pravda . In the spring of 1932 he was ordered to the Caspian Sea to explore seal populations again.
In 1934 he participated in the rescue of the Chelyuskin occupation. With an R-5 , Wodopjanow flew a total of ten people on April 12 in three missions. After these flights he finally decided to switch to the polar air fleet (Полярная Авиация, Poljarnaja Aviazija).
In May 1937 he was one of the pilots who set off Iwan Papanin's North Pole 1 polar expedition on a drifting ice floe with four-engine ANT-6 aircraft . On May 21, Wodopyanov was the first person to land on an airplane (registration number: N-170) at the North Pole.
During the Second World War , from August 9 to 17, 1941, he was in command of the 81st long-distance flying division equipped with Pe-8 , which he also carried out during one of the first bombing raids by the Soviet air forces on Berlin on the night of August 10th to 11th 1941 commanded. After being replaced by Alexander Golovanov , he continued to fly as the commander of a Pe-8 in the division's 746th bomber squadron.
After the war he retired from the army in 1946 with the rank of major general and worked as a writer in Moscow. Wodopjanow is among other things the author of the books "The Pilot's Dream" and "The Flieger Tschkalow ". He also rejoined the polar air fleet and was involved, among other things, in 1950 as the leader of the “North Pole 2” expedition in the construction of the Soviet Union's second drifting research station on an ice floe.
Michael Wodopyanow was a bearer of the Order of Lenin , the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Great Patriotic War . His son Vladimir Wodopyanow was also an aviator and served in the polar air fleet.
Works (selection)
- Полюс, 1939 (German edition: Der Pol , 1953)
- Полярный лётчик, 1953 (German edition: Polarflieger , 1953)
- Валерий Чкалов, 1954 (German edition: Der Flieger Tschkalow , 1963)
literature
- Ulrich Unger: The rescue of the “Tscheljuskin” crew . In: Aviation calendar of the GDR . 1984.
- Wilfried Copenhagen : Lexicon Soviet Aviation . Elbe-Dnjepr, Klitzschen 2007, ISBN 978-3-933395-90-0 .
- People . In: Fliegerrevue . No. 10 , 1980, pp. 423 (obituary for the death of M. Wodopjanow).
Web links
- Literature by and about Michail Wassiljewitsch Wodopjanow in the catalog of the German National Library
- Article Michail Wassiljewitsch Wodopjanow in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (BSE) , 3rd edition 1969–1978 (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ivan Timofejewtsch Spirin: The conquest of the North Pole. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1955, pp. 32–34
- ↑ Ulrich Unger: Pe-8: The Soviet long-range bomber . Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, Berlin 1993, p. 227 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wodopjanow, Michail Wassiljewitsch |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Водопьянов, Михаил Васильевич (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | soviet pilot |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 18, 1899 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Studjonka |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 11, 1980 |
| Place of death | Moscow |