From ditch-digger to designer

Sergey Ilyushin was the youngest of eleven children in a peasant family in the village of Dilyalevo, near Vologda. As a teenager he dug ditches, cleaned gutters at a dye works in St Petersburg and, in 1910, took a job as a groundsman at the Kolomyazhsky racecourse — just as Russia’s first ballooning festival arrived there. He unpacked crates, met the pioneer aviators, and was hooked. Conscripted in 1914, he volunteered for the new aviation section, worked as a mechanic and qualified as a pilot in 1917. After the Revolution he studied at the air force academy, designed prize-winning gliders, and on 13 January 1933 was given a design team of his own at Moscow’s Aviation Plant No. 39. It numbered seven people.

The flying tank

The bureau’s first hit was a bomber, the DB-3, later the Il-4. But its immortal aircraft was something else entirely: an armoured ground-attack machine. In the Il-2, metallurgists from the VIAM institute did not bolt armour onto an aircraft; they made the armour the aircraft, a load-bearing steel shell around the engine, fuel and cockpit. Soldiers called it the Flying Tank, the Hunchback or the Flying Infantryman; its pilots called it Ilyusha. The prototype flew on 2 October 1939. To save weight it went into production as a single-seater, and early pilots paid for it. When a rear gunner was added back, he had far less armour than the pilot and suffered about four times the casualties.

Like air, like bread

Then the factories fell behind. In 1941, with production evacuated east, Stalin sent a telegram to the directors of two aircraft plants that has become part of the type’s legend. He accused them of letting the country down and told them the Red Army needed the Il-2 like the air it breathed and the bread it ate — adding that this was his final warning. Output rose fast. By 1945 the factories had built 36,183 Il-2s, and with its successor, the Il-10, the total reached 42,330. No military aircraft design has ever been built in greater numbers. In 1942 the bureau itself was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Kokkinaki and the long-distance years

Ilyushin’s chief test pilot from 1935 to 1964, Vladimir Kokkinaki, was a showman as much as a tester. In April 1936 he looped the twin-engined TsKB-26 in front of Stalin, the first loop in a twin. In 1938 he flew a modified bomber named Moskva 7,580 km from Moscow to the Far East in 24 hours 36 minutes. In April 1939 he tried to fly it non-stop to New York for the World’s Fair, but bad weather forced him down on Miscou Island in Canada. His bombers had a harder job in 1941: on the night of 7–8 August, fifteen Baltic Fleet DB-3Ts dropped the first Soviet bombs on Berlin.

Aeroflot’s airline

After the war Ilyushin turned to airliners. The piston Il-12 and Il-14 became the workhorses of Aeroflot and its allies, and the Il-14 was built under licence in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. In 1957 came the four-turboprop Il-18, on which Kokkinaki set thirteen more world records. The Il-28 jet bomber, first flown on 8 July 1948, was built by the thousand and copied without licence in China as the Harbin H-5; North Korea still flies it. In 1963 the Il-62 gave Aeroflot a long-range jet airliner, with four engines mounted at the tail. The Il-86 of 1976 was the country’s first wide-body.

The airlifter

Ilyushin retired in 1970 and handed over to Genrikh Novozhilov, who would run the bureau for 35 years. His signature aircraft had begun in 1967: the Il-76, a high-winged four-jet freighter with a rear ramp and a glazed navigator’s nose, built to land on rough strips. It first flew on 25 March 1971 and was built in Tashkent, then in the Uzbek SSR. Around 980 have been made, and the airframe became an aerial tanker (the Il-78), the A-50 radar aircraft, a firefighter and a flying laboratory. A modernised Il-76MD-90A is now built at Aviastar in Ulyanovsk. Ilyushin itself built only prototypes; the series factories did the rest.

Sanctions and second chances

The collapse of the Soviet Union hit hard. The Il-96 wide-body and the Il-114 regional turboprop arrived into a collapsing market, and the Il-114 line in Tashkent stopped in 2012 after 22 aircraft. Ilyushin was folded into United Aircraft Corporation in 2006 and has been under EU, US, Canadian, Japanese and Ukrainian sanctions since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The sanctions also gave it a second chance. The Il-114-300, built from Russian parts, flew on 16 December 2020, was delayed after the fatal crash of the related Il-112V military transport near Kubinka on 17 August 2021, and won its Russian type certificate on 5 June 2026.

Factories

• Aviation Plant No. 39 (Menzhinsky) · Moscow — Birthplace of the bureau in 1933; the bureau had to vacate it by December 1940
• Aviation Plant No. 18 · Kuibyshev (Samara) — Main Il-2 producer through the war; the bureau was evacuated here in October 1941
• Plant No. 240 (later Strela) · Moscow — Bureau’s production base from April 1942; built Ilyushin prototypes
• Flight test station · Ramenskoye (Zhukovsky)
• Tashkent Aviation Production Association · Tashkent, Uzbekistan — Built the Il-76 and Il-114
• Voronezh Aircraft Production Association (VASO) · Voronezh — Built the Il-86 and Il-96
• Aviastar-SP · Ulyanovsk — Builds the Il-76MD-90A

People

• Sergey Ilyushin (1894–1977) · founder and general designer — Led the bureau until 1970; three times Hero of Socialist Labour; buried at Novodevichy Cemetery
• Genrikh Novozhilov (1925–2019) · general designer 1970–2005 — Led the Il-76, Il-86 and Il-96 era
• Viktor Livanov · general designer 2005–2014
• Vladimir Kokkinaki (1904–1985) · chief test pilot 1935–1964 — Set 22 world records, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, later president of the FAI
• Sergey Kishkin and Nikolai Sklyarov · VIAM metallurgists — Designed the load-bearing armour shell of the Il-2
• Nikolai Kuimov · test pilot, Hero of the Russian Federation — Killed in the Il-112V crash, 17 August 2021

Records and firsts

• Il-2: 36,183 built, the most-produced military aircraft design in history
• First loop in a twin-engined aircraft, TsKB-26, flown by Kokkinaki on 20 April 1936
• First official Soviet aviation record, an altitude-with-payload record in the TsKB-26, 17 July 1936
• DB-3 closed-circuit record, Moscow–Sevastopol–Sverdlovsk–Moscow, 5,018 km, 28 June 1937
• Moskva: Moscow to Spassk-Dalny, 7,580 km in 24 hours 36 minutes, 27–28 June 1938
• Il-18: thirteen altitude, payload and speed records, 1958–1960
• Il-86: first Soviet wide-body airliner, 1976