In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio station with loudspeakers to boom slogans down onto the crowds below. They called it the Maxim Gorky, after the writer, and it was the flagship of Soviet propaganda.

The day before it flew for the last time, a French airmail pilot named Antoine de Saint-Exupery — soon to write The Little Prince — climbed aboard as the only foreigner ever admitted. The next day, a show-off fighter pilot looped around the colossus, clipped it, and sent it and everyone inside it into a Moscow suburb.

A flying monument

The ANT-20 was designed by Andrei Tupolev and paid for by public subscription, a deliberate symbol of Soviet industrial might. It was genuinely enormous — so large that passenger cabins were built not only down the fuselage but inside the thickness of the wings themselves. Its onboard radio station, "Voice from the Sky," could broadcast to the ground while loudspeakers under the wings blared music and slogans over rallies.

The writer who flew aboard

Saint-Exupery had been sent to Moscow by the newspaper Paris-Soir, and on 17 May 1935 he was given a seat aboard the Maxim Gorky for a demonstration flight — the only foreign national ever to fly in it. He marvelled at the sheer scale of the machine and the strange grace with which it left the ground.

The fatal loop

The following day, 18 May 1935, the Maxim Gorky went up again, this time with passengers who were mostly the engineers who had built it, along with some of their families, as a reward for their work. Two smaller aircraft flew alongside to give a sense of scale for the cameras. One was an I-5 fighter piloted by Nikolai Blagin, who — against orders — began throwing his little biplane into aerobatic loops around the giant.

On the third loop, Blagin misjudged it. His fighter smashed into the Maxim Gorky's wing. The colossus broke apart in the air and fell onto the Sokol district of Moscow.

The reckoning

Everyone aboard the Maxim Gorky was killed — its crew and passengers, many of them the very people who had designed and built it, together with their families — along with Blagin in the fighter. Accounts of the exact toll vary, but around 45 people died in a matter of minutes. The greatest aircraft in the world had been destroyed not by an enemy or a storm, but by a moment of showing off.

The Soviets later built an improved version, the ANT-20bis, which flew as an airliner until it too was lost in a crash in 1942. But the original Maxim Gorky remains one of aviation's starkest lessons: the bigger and prouder the machine, the smaller the mistake it takes to bring it down.

Sources: Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Paris-Soir (1935); Aviation Safety Network; Vintage Aviation News; Rex's Hangar.