Sigismund Alexandrowitsch Levanewski

Sigismund Alexandrowitsch Levanewski

Sigizmund Levanevsky ( Russian Сигизмунд Александрович Леваневский ; born May 2 ^{. Jul} / 15. May  1902 ^greg. In St. Petersburg , disappeared on 13. August 1937 in the northern polar region) was a Soviet pilot and Hero of the Soviet Union .

Life

Lewanewski was the third of four children in a Polish family. His parents came from a village near the Beloweschsk National Park and had moved to Saint Petersburg before he was born. His father, who worked as a caretaker, died in 1910. Since the mother, who worked as a seamstress, could hardly support the family, Levanewski was forced to drop out of school after three years and take a job as a factory worker in 1916. He joined the Red Guard during the October Revolution and joined the Red Army in 1918 . During the civil war he was company and later battalion commander. In 1921 he was posted to Buinaksk , where he met his wife Natalja Alexandrovna Degtjarjewa and married in the same year. After the end of the war, he attended the Sea Aviation School in Sevastopol from autumn 1923 and graduated in 1925. A short time later he was appointed director of the OSOAVIACHIM flying school in Nikolaev . In 1931 he switched to school in Poltava .

Levanewski (2nd from right) in Fairbanks in 1934 shortly before the start to rescue the Chelyuskin castaways

In 1933 Lewanewski switched to civil aviation and flew with GLAWSEWMORPUT ( Headquarters of the Northern Sea Route ). In the same year he flew the American pilot James Mattern, who crash landed in Chukotka, with a whale flying boat to Nome in Alaska, for which he received the Order of the Red Star .

In March / April 1934 he was one of the seven pilots who were involved in rescuing the shipwrecked crew of the sunken steamer Tscheljuskin from an ice floe. To do this, he flew as instructed with Georgi Uschakow and the pilot Mawriki Slepnjow in a Deruluft plane from Moscow to Berlin and from there on to London to travel on to the USA by ship. Two Fleetster aircraft were bought there, with which those involved took off on March 29, 1934 from Nome in the direction of Wankarem , where the rescue was to be organized. Shortly before the goal, Lewanewski made a crash landing due to bad weather, in which he was slightly injured. His two passengers, Ushakov and the American mechanic Clyde Armistead, were unharmed. They spent the night in a nearby Chukchi village and drove on the next day by dog sledding to their destination, some 60 km away. Although Levanewski was no longer able to actively participate in the evacuation of the Chelyuskin crew due to his destroyed aircraft, he was awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union" order on April 20, 1934 for the transport of the organizer Ushakov to Vankarem. awarded.

Levanewski then traveled to London with Vasily Molokov in June 1934 to visit an international air show. In the fall of 1934 he began studying at the Moscow Zhukovsky Academy , but interrupted it again the following year to prepare for a transpolar flight to the USA, which started on August 3, but was broken off again by Levanewski due to supposed technical problems ( see following paragraph). At the beginning of 1936 he traveled with a delegation to the USA to negotiate with the Vultee and Consolidated companies about a possible delivery or license production of aircraft.

While trying to carry out another transpolar flight from the Soviet Union to the USA, Levanewski's plane disappeared over the North Pole on August 13, 1937 . The crew has since been missing and was pronounced dead by the Soviet government on the first anniversary of the flight on August 12, 1938.

Lewanewski is the author of the books “Mein Element” and “Rostow-on-Don” from 1935. His second oldest brother, Józef Lewoniewski , who had returned to Poland with the rest of the family after the October Revolution, also became a pilot. He died in 1933 when his plane crashed near Kazan . The younger sister Sofia was married to Wacław Kornatzki, a member of the Polish Air Force . Levanewski had two children with his wife Natalja Lewanewskaja, son Vladik and daughter Nora.

Failed polar flight

Lewanewski's DB-A during the preparations for the long-haul flight

In 1937 Levanewski attempted to make a long-distance flight between the USSR and the USA over the North Pole with a four-engine DB-A bomber . As early as the spring of 1935, he had turned to Josef Stalin to be allowed to fly over the North Pole to San Francisco in an ANT-25 . Stalin gave his approval. Levanewski started on August 3, 1935 together with the copilot Georgi Baidukow and the navigator Viktor Levtschenko on the record attempt, but broke it off over the Barents Sea because he mistakenly viewed the oil tank, which was leaking due to overfilling, as an average. During the final evaluation of the flight, Levanewski described the designer Andrei Tupolew as a pest and a traitor and declared that he would never again want to fly in one of his aircraft.

In May 1937 he announced the decision to undertake the flight with the DB-A, a construction by Viktor Bolkhovitinov . Baidukov, who had already flown the plane, expressed his concerns about the machine, which had not yet been adequately tested, but was blocked by Stalin.

A short time later, an ANT-25 flew with Tschkalow , Baidukow and Belyakov over the Pole to the USA, a month later a second with the crew of Gromov , Yumaschew (1902–1988) and Danilin (1901–1978). Levanewski came under time pressure. The six-person crew was put together in a hurry and did not have the time to get used to each other. A month before the flight, the radio operator Leonid Kerber (1903-1993, later one of the deputy chief designers of OKB Tupolev ) was arrested in the course of the Stalinist purges and replaced by Nikolai Jakowlewitsch Galkowski (* 1905).

On August 12, 1937, the prototype of the DB-A was ready at the Schcholkowo airfield near Moscow. The aircraft had been given a blue fuselage paint for the flight, the wing had a signal red paint. Due to the unfavorable omen of the flight, flight engineer Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Godowikow (* 1893) and navigator Viktor Ivanovich Levtschenko (* 1906) answered the farewell greetings from the ground crew with "Farewell!" Instead of the usual "Goodbye!" The take-off was carried out by copilot Nikolai Kastanajew (* 1904).

After crossing the pole under poor weather conditions, the crew reported the failure of the right outer engine by radio after a flight time of 19:27 hours. After a while all radio contact broke off. Despite extensive searches by seven American and 24 Soviet aircraft, no trace of the DB-A with the identification SSSR N-209 could be found. In May 1938 the search was stopped after an area of ​​58,000 km² had been searched.

Honors

Levanewski was a bearer of the Order of Lenin , the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star . After his death, the Neale Island in the Franz Josef Land archipelago was renamed Lewanewski Island.

literature

• Wilfried Copenhagen : Lexicon Soviet Aviation . Elbe-Dnjepr, Klitzschen 2007, ISBN 978-3-933395-90-0 .
• Ulrich Unger: The transpolar flight S. A. Lewanewskis . In: Aviator Calendar of the GDR 1982 . Military Publishing House , Berlin 1981, p. 50-64 .
• Ulrich Unger: The rescue of the “Tscheljuskin” crew . In: Aviation calendar of the GDR . 1984.
• Jurij Salnikow: Lost in the Arctic . Elbe-Dnjepr, Klitzschen 2012, ISBN 978-3-940541-38-3 .

Web links

Commons : Sigismund Lewanewski  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography in the Great Aviation Encyclopedia (Russian)
• Newspaper article about Sigismund Alexandrowitsch Lewanewski in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ulrich Unger: 1937 - Moscow – North Pole . In: Flieger Revue No. 3, 1997, p. 52