The Petlyakov Pe-2: from a prison drawing board to the Red Army’s spearhead

What makes the Pe-2 special

Full Petlyakov Pe-2 specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe a standard production Pe-2FT of 1943 as it left State Aircraft Factory No. 22 at Kazan — two Klimov M-105PF, the shielded dorsal turret with a 12.7 mm UBT, and the reduced nose glazing that came with the Frontovoye Trebovaniye standard. Deltas for the original M-105RA aircraft of 1941, for the Pe-3 heavy fighter, and for the late Pe-2B and Pe-2I are given in grey. Three cautions apply before anything below is quoted. First, the production total is genuinely unsettled: the figure most often printed is 11,427, and aviastar states explicitly that this covers Pe-2s and Pe-3s together; the English Wikipedia entry gives 11,430; the Russian entry gives 11,247 with a factory breakdown (10,144 from Kazan No. 22, 896 from No. 39, 144 from No. 125 at Irkutsk, 104 from No. 124) that sums correctly to its own total. The 11,247 and 11,427 pair differ by a transposed digit and one of them is almost certainly a typographical ghost that has been copied for decades. The honest statement is “a little over 11,400, including the Pe-3s”. Second, dimensions vary between sources: 17.16 m span and 12.66 m length are the best-attested, but airwar.ru prints 17.60 m and 12.60 m, and museum placards follow whichever book was to hand. Third, speed fell steadily through the war as weight, armour and drag were added — a 1941 aircraft and a 1944 aircraft with nominally the same engine were not the same aeroplane.

Armament & payload

The Pe-2 carried a modest bomb load quickly, and spent four years growing guns it had never been designed to mount

One thousand kilogrammes was the ceiling, and 600 kg was the normal load. That is small — a Ju 88 lifted two to three times as much, and the Pe-2’s own bay was so shallow that only four 100 kg bombs would go inside it, with a further 100 kg tucked into a small cell at the rear of each engine nacelle and everything heavier hung on external racks that cost speed. This was not a design failure so much as a design inheritance: the fuselage had been drawn around a pressure cabin and a cannon bay for a high-altitude fighter, and a bomb bay was cut into it afterwards.

The defensive armament is the part of the story worth following, because it is where the front line rewrote the aeroplane. The Pe-2 entered service in 1941 with four rifle-calibre 7.62 mm ShKAS — two fixed in the nose, one in a crude dorsal mount, one firing down through a ventral hatch. Against a Bf 109F this was close to useless, and the ventral gunner in particular had almost no field of view or fire, which German pilots learned to exploit within weeks. From Series 13 the heavy 12.7 mm Berezin appeared, and the Pe-2FT of 1942 — the letters stand for Frontovoye Trebovaniye, front-line demand, and Leonid Selyakov drew it at Zavod 22 in response to what regiments were saying — gave the dorsal gunner a proper shielded turret with a UBT. Soviet staff work credits that single change with lifting a Pe-2’s expected life from roughly 20 sorties to roughly 54. Fits varied enormously by series, by factory and by field workshop; a 1941 aircraft, a 1943 Pe-2FT, a Pe-3bis and a Pe-2B were four different armament standards wearing the same silhouette, and no single table describes them all.

Sourcing caveat: Soviet armament tables were written by series and amended by field workshops, and captured-aircraft reports describe what one aeroplane carried on one day. Ammunition counts in particular are quoted inconsistently across sources. Where a figure above is given without a range, it is the one most consistently attested across the English and Russian Wikipedia entries and aviastar; where sources conflict outright, the conflict is stated rather than averaged away.

Variants

Vladimir Petlyakov designed a pressurised high-altitude fighter in a prison, and was given 45 days to turn it into a dive bomber

On 21 October 1937 Vladimir Petlyakov was arrested alongside Andrei Tupolev and much of the TsAGI leadership on fabricated charges of sabotage, espionage and assisting the Russian Fascist Party. It is often written that he was imprisoned for the failure of the ANT-42 — the four-engined high-altitude bomber that eventually flew as the TB-7 and then the Pe-8 — and the project’s troubles, particularly its awkward fifth-engine supercharger installation, certainly supplied a pretext. But it is worth being exact: the charge sheet was an NKVD fiction of the kind being issued in thousands that autumn, and Petlyakov was swept up in the destruction of the Tupolev bureau rather than prosecuted for an engineering failure. The distinction matters, because the Soviet state did not conclude that he was a bad designer. It concluded that he was a useful one who could be worked without wages.

Rather than being shot, he was put into TsKB-29 — the NKVD’s aviation sharashka, a prison design bureau in Moscow where Tupolev, Myasishchev, Korolev and Petlyakov each ran a brigade under guard. Petlyakov’s section, STO and later KB-100, was given a twin-engined pressurised high-altitude interceptor to answer the German high-altitude bombers Soviet intelligence believed were coming. That aircraft, the VI-100, flew on 22 December 1939: all-metal, turbo-supercharged, pressure-cabined, packed with electric actuators, designed for 630 km/h at 10,000 m, and unlike almost anything else in Soviet service. It was shown over Red Square on May Day 1940. The second prototype caught fire in the air after a fuel-line nut was left loose and crashed into a kindergarten.

Then the requirement vanished. Soviet intelligence established that Germany had no serious high-altitude bomber programme, while the Blitzkrieg in France demonstrated exactly what a dive bomber did to an army. In May 1940 the order came down to convert the VI-100 into a three-seat dive bomber, the PB-100, and to do it in 45 days. Around 300 engineers were drafted in from other bureaux. The pressure cabin and turbo-superchargers were deleted as, in the phrase of the time, an inessential luxury; the nose was reglazed for a bombardier, a bay was cut into the fuselage, dive brakes were added and a ventral gunner was found room. It went into production without a flying prototype — static test only — and was redesignated Pe-2 in December 1940 under the new practice of naming aircraft after their designers. Petlyakov was released in 1940 and given a Stalin Prize in 1941 for the aeroplane he had designed in prison. He did not live to see it mature: on 12 January 1942 he was killed when the Pe-2 carrying him to Moscow, where he intended to argue about production problems, caught fire and crashed near Arzamas.

In service the type was fast, clean, structurally sound and thoroughly demanding. It needed real force on the wheel to rotate — in the 587th Regiment, where the crews were women, navigators routinely reached over and hauled on the control column with the pilot — and it came back onto the ground at about 150 km/h onto shock struts that bounced. It killed inexperienced crews on aerodromes as well as over targets. It was, nevertheless, the backbone: at its peak the Pe-2 made up around three-quarters of the Soviet twin-engined bomber force, it flew at Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration and Berlin, and the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment — formed by Marina Raskova on 8 October 1941, one of her three women’s regiments, and the only one given a modern combat aircraft rather than hand-me-downs — became the 125th Guards in September 1943, flew 1,134 missions, dropped over 980 tonnes of bombs and produced five Heroes of the Soviet Union. Raskova herself never reached the front with it: on 4 January 1943, leading two other Pe-2s to a forward airfield near Stalingrad, she went in attempting a forced landing on the bank of the Volga. She was given the first Soviet state funeral of the war and her ashes were placed in the Kremlin wall.

VI-100 (1939–40, 2 prototypes)

The original: a two-seat pressurised high-altitude heavy fighter on M-105R engines with TK-3 turbo-superchargers, armed with two 20 mm ShVAK and two ShKAS and carrying experimental KS-76 and KS-100 aerial-shell weapons. First flight 22 December 1939. The second prototype was lost to an in-flight fire.

PB-100 / Pe-2 2M-105 (1940–41)

The 45-day conversion: three seats, glazed bombardier’s nose, internal bay, nacelle bomb cells, dive brakes, no pressure cabin, no turbo-superchargers. Ordered straight into production off the drawing board with static test only; first two aircraft completed at Zavod 39 in late autumn 1940, trials from 15 December 1940, redesignated Pe-2 that same month. About 458 had been delivered by the German invasion.

Pe-2 early series (1941–42, Series 1 to about 82)

Four rifle-calibre ShKAS, M-105RA engines, thin armour, high fire risk. From Series 13 the 12.7 mm UBK and UBT began to appear; from Series 32, rocket rails. The version that took the catastrophic losses of 1941, largely because crews were sent in low against flak in aircraft they had barely flown.

Pe-2FT (1942–45, the main production standard, over 4,000 built)

Frontovoye Trebovaniye, front-line demand: Leonid Selyakov’s answer at Zavod 22 to what regiments were asking for. Shielded dorsal turret with a 12.7 mm UBT, better ventral mounting, thicker armour, uprated M-105PF engines, simplified nose glazing, and on many aircraft the dive brakes deleted. Standard from Series 83. The single change that most improved crew survival.

Pe-2B (1944, production standard)

Late refinement of the FT with further aerodynamic clean-up, revised armament mountings and improved crew accommodation. The last major bomber standard before the Tu-2 began displacing the type.

Pe-2R and Pe-2 Paravan (1941–45, small numbers)

Pe-2R: three-seat photo-reconnaissance conversion with AFA cameras and extra fuel in the bay, and among the most useful things the airframe ever did. Paravan: a handful fitted with a projecting steel cable-cutting frame for barrage-balloon work.

Pe-2UT / UPe-2 (1943–45)

Dual-control conversion trainer with a raised instructor’s cockpit in place of the dorsal position. Built in quantity precisely because the standard aeroplane was too difficult to convert onto directly, which is an admission in metal.

Pe-2I and Pe-2M (1944–45, 5 and a handful)

Vladimir Myasishchev’s redesign after Petlyakov’s death: VK-107A engines, deeper fuselage with a 1,000 kg internal bay, defensive armament reduced to remotely sighted guns, and about 656 km/h — faster than the Bf 109 G at the altitudes it worked. Too late, and the Tu-2 had the ground.

Pe-3 and Pe-3bis (1941–44, about 360 in total)

The heavy fighter the airframe had originally been: two seats, ventral position deleted, extra fuel, guns moved forward. Authorised in four days after the July 1941 night raids on Moscow and flown on 7 August 1941. Production ran 196 in 1941, 132 Pe-3bis in 1942, 13 in 1943 and 19 lightly armed aircraft in 1944. The Pe-3bis added a 20 mm ShVAK and 136 kg of armour. Roughly 50 were lost in the first three months, a quarter of those built, after which the survivors were pushed into long-range reconnaissance and navigation-leader work, where they were genuinely valuable — the 9th Regiment led over 2,000 aircraft to their targets.

B-32 / CB-32 (Czechoslovakia, 1946–51, 32 and 3)

Czechoslovak service designations, not licence-built aircraft: 32 Pe-2FT and 3 UPe-2 operated from May 1946 to mid-1951. Yugoslavia flew 123 Pe-2FT and 9 UPe-2 from 1945 to 1954, and Poland operated the type with both its air force and its navy. Finland was the odd operator out, buying six captured aircraft from Germany in 1941 and one more in 1944 and flying them on reconnaissance, not as bombers.

Survivors, counted carefully, because almost nothing about this type survived intact. There is no airworthy Pe-2 anywhere in the world, and there never has been since the last Yugoslav aircraft were retired in 1954. Every complete airframe on display today is either a post-war service survivor left outdoors or a wreck lifted out of a lake or a forest and rebuilt. The most substantially original aircraft is the Pe-2FT with works number 2-225, built at Kazan in August 1943 and flown by the 29th Bomber Aviation Regiment of the Soviet Northern Fleet as tactical number 33: it force-landed on the frozen lake Koshkayavr in the Murmansk region on 2 December 1943, sank, was lifted out by helicopter crane in October 1996, was conserved in Norway, and passed to the Czech Military History Institute in September 2013 for a restoration at the Kbely aviation museum in Prague. The Museum of the Polish Army in Warsaw holds a Pe-2FT from post-war Polish service, displayed outdoors and carrying no published works number — the most complete airframe that was not dug out of a crash site. The Central Air Force Museum at Monino has a Pe-2FT that is openly described as a composite assembled from parts of several recovered airframes, with no original identity. The UMMC Museum Complex at Verkhnyaya Pyshma in the Urals displays a Pe-2 rebuilt from recovered wreckage. The Norwegian Aviation Museum at Bodø holds the nose and cockpit section of Pe-2FT 16/141, shot down on 29 March 1943, the rest of the aircraft being unrecoverable. That is essentially the complete list: two rebuilt composites, one post-war survivor, one recovered original under restoration and one nose section, from a production run of more than 11,000. Treat museum placards with care — several of these aircraft have carried markings and unit histories over the years that their airframes cannot support, and where a works number has not been published the safe description is “a Pe-2FT of unrecorded identity”.

The Petlyakov Pe-2 through the war and after

Twelve stories of the Petlyakov Pe-2

The Petlyakov Pe-2 in pictures

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The Petlyakov Pe-2 in motion

A verified, high-authority video feature for the Pe-2 is still being sourced. Video coming soon.

Where the Petlyakov Pe-2 flew

The Pe-2’s place in the war

The Pe-2’s significance is measured less in individual duels than in scale and endurance: it was the Soviet Union’s standard front-line bomber for four years, flown on every major front by thousands of crews. Its speed made it hard to intercept, and its numbers made it indispensable.

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures as of 2026.

Everything people ask about the Petlyakov Pe-2

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Every fact, checked

• World War II Database — Pe-2 PeshkaSpecifications, the sharashka origin and the 45-day conversion story.
• Wing Web — The Petlyakov Pe-2VI-100 origins, dive brakes and Petlyakov’s fatal 1942 crash.
• Wright Museum of WWII — The 587th Bomber Aviation RegimentThe women-organised Pe-2 regiment and its Guards designation.
• Defense Media Network — Soviet Female AviatorsDistinguishing the 587th Pe-2 unit from the Po-2 “Night Witches.”
• The Aviation Geek Club — Petlyakov Pe-2The Pe-2 as the backbone of the Soviet light-bomber force.
• Military Factory — Petlyakov Pe-2Production figures, variants and the Pe-3 heavy-fighter derivative.
• WW2 Weapons — Pe-2Engine, performance and service data for the type.
• Imperial War MuseumsGeneral reference on Eastern Front air operations and Soviet aircraft.