The little fighter that opened the monoplane age

What makes it special

Full specifications

Baseline note: the figures below describe the I-16 Type 24, the definitive Shvetsov M-63 aircraft ordered into production in 1939 and the mark that equipped most of the fighter regiments destroyed in the first weeks of the German invasion. Deltas for the M-25A Type 5 of Spain and China, the four-gun Type 10, the ShVAK-armed Type 17, 27 and 28 and the Berezin-armed Type 29 are given in grey. The tabulated figures come from the Zavod No. 21 and NII VVS data reproduced by Maslov; where Russian and Western reference works disagree the disagreement is stated rather than averaged. On climb, note the method: Soviet practice of the 1930s quoted time to a stated height, and those rows are kept because they are the primary evidence, but a rate of climb in metres per second is also tabulated because the same sources give one, and it is placed first.

Armament & payload

The I-16 fired the first air-to-air rockets in the history of air combat, and spent the rest of its career losing an argument about calibre

The armament story of the I-16 is one long attempt to put enough weight of fire into an aeroplane whose wing could not carry it. It began in 1934 with two rifle-calibre PV-1 guns in the wings, reached four 7.62 mm ShKAS by 1938, and produced in the Type 17 the first Soviet fighter with a pair of 20 mm ShVAK cannon — a genuinely lethal battery that cost the aircraft some 23 km/h and almost a quarter of its rate of climb. Nothing in the family solved the problem, because the wing area never changed while the loaded weight rose by nearly a third.

What the I-16 did achieve, and what no other fighter had achieved before, was the first successful use of unguided rockets in air-to-air combat. On 20 August 1939 over the Khalkhin Gol a flight of five rocket-armed I-16s led by Captain N. I. Zvonarev fired RS-82s at Japanese Ki-27s from roughly a kilometre; the group is credited with thirteen to nineteen aircraft over the campaign. It was a curiosity at the time and it is a milestone now: every air-to-air rocket battery of the 1950s, and by extension the guided missile, descends from a weapon that was really designed to be shot at ground targets. Gun fits, ammunition allowances and rocket provision varied by production batch, by factory and by unit modification, and the Spanish, Chinese and Finnish airframes were not maintained or armed to a single standard.

Sourcing caveat: ammunition allowances and rocket provision are given as they appear in Soviet factory and NII VVS documents reproduced by Maslov and in the 1941 M-63 technical description. Front-line practice diverged constantly — guns were removed to save weight, rocket rails were fitted to marks that never received them at the factory, and cannon-armed aircraft were reworked back to machine guns when ShVAK ammunition ran short. Claim totals on all sides at Khalkhin Gol and in 1941 substantially exceed verified losses.

Variants

Eleven production types in seven years, each adding weight to a wing that never grew

The I-16 was aviation’s great leap and its great trap in the same airframe. Nikolai Polikarpov’s TsKB-12 first flew on 30 December 1933 in the hands of Valery Chkalov, and it was the first fighter anywhere to combine a cantilever low wing, a retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit in genuine mass production. The precedents deserve stating precisely, because the claim is often made too broadly: the Grumman FF that reached service with retractable gear was a biplane, the Consolidated P-30 monoplane was a two-seater built in very small numbers, Boeing’s P-26 had fixed gear, and Sukhoi’s all-metal I-14 flew seven months before the I-16 but was ordered in numbers too small to matter. It was the I-16 that made the configuration ordinary, and something over 10,000 were built.

The trap was that Polikarpov bought his speed by wrapping the smallest possible fuselage around a big radial, which left the aeroplane short coupled and longitudinally unstable. It could not be flown hands off. The controls were light to the point of treachery, an abrupt input would put it into a spin, and the addition of armour, radio, battery and flaps through the late 1930s moved the centre of gravity further aft until a 1939 state study found pilots holding forward stick just to fly level. Against that it rolled at over 240 degrees per second, which in the hands of a Spanish or Chinese veteran was a weapon in itself. It rewarded expertise absolutely and punished inexperience absolutely, and in 1941 the VVS was full of inexperience.

The type’s combat career divides cleanly. Over Madrid from 13 November 1936 it was the best fighter in Spain, faster than the Heinkel He 51 and the Fiat CR.32 and a match for the first Bf 109Bs; Republican pilots called it Mosca, the fly, and Nationalist pilots Rata, the rat, and both names stuck. Somewhere between 276 and 475 reached Spain depending on which delivery return is counted, with fourteen more assembled locally under a 1937 licence; 52 were captured and Spain flew them until 1953. Against Japan it was competitive but no better, losing 88 of roughly 300 to 500 committed at Khalkhin Gol in 1939, mostly to Nakajima Ki-27s. And then on 22 June 1941 it was obsolete: 1,635 of the 4,226 VVS aircraft in the frontier districts were I-16s, only 937 survived the first 48 hours, and by the end of the year front-line strength was about 240.

TsKB-12, Type 4 and UTI-2 (1933–36, 555 Type 4 and 49 UTI-2)

The M-22 Jupiter aircraft: 480 hp, two wing guns, 362 km/h, and a fully enclosed sliding canopy. Underpowered and already the fastest fighter in Soviet service. The UTI-2 was the first two-seat conversion, with fixed gear.

I-16 Type 5 (1936–37, 2,859 built)

The M-25A of 730 hp, new cowling, spinner and starting ratchet; two wing ShKAS, 445 km/h, and the aircraft that fought in Spain and China. Retained the enclosed canopy, which Spanish veterans disliked so intensely that its deletion became a formal requirement.

I-16 Type 6 and Type 12 (1937–38, small batches; 22 Type 12)

The direct Spanish lessons. The Type 6 added a synchronised gun under the engine, an oil cooler and back armour, and deleted the canopy at pilots’ demand; the ship carrying the batch to Spain was sunk. The Type 12 was the first ShVAK cannon aircraft, on a Type 5 airframe.

I-16 Type 10 (1938–39, 934 built)

The definitive four-gun aeroplane and the one most people picture: M-25V of 750 hp, two synchronised ShKAS added over the engine with 650 rounds each, open cockpit, retractable skis. Assembled under licence in Spain and supplied in quantity to China. Reached Spain almost simultaneously with the Bf 109D.

I-16 Type 17 and Type 27 (1938–40, 341 and part of 352 with the Type 28)

Two 20 mm ShVAK in the wings with 150 rounds per gun, in place of the wing ShKAS. The Type 27 was the same aircraft re-engined with the M-62. Formidably armed, more than 20 km/h slower and markedly worse in climb, and some 300 kg heavier at take-off than the Type 5 airframe it came from.

I-16 Type 18 and Type 20 (1939, 1,322 including the Type 24)

The M-62 with its two-speed supercharger, a VISh-6A propeller and a tailwheel in place of the skid. A field idea from Khalkhin Gol, worked up from I-153 repair kits, that improved longitudinal stability in turns and loops and made the aircraft less prone to being over-rotated on landing. The Type 20 added drop-tank plumbing.

I-16 Type 24 (1939–41, see Type 18)

The baseline of this page. M-63 of 1,100 hp, strengthened structure, 3 mm plywood between the wing spars to cure wing twist, drop tanks, flaps across the centre section, four ShKAS and six RS-82. The best-developed I-16 and still a 1933 aeroplane, which is why 1941 went the way it did.

I-16 Type 28 and Type 29 (1940–41, 352 and 650)

The last two. The Type 28 was a Type 24 with the wing ShVAK of the Type 27; the Type 29 dropped the wing guns entirely for a single 12.7 mm Berezin BS under the centre section, and at 470 km/h was the fastest production I-16. Both were, in armament terms, right; both were far too late.

UTI-4 (Type 15) and special conversions (1937–41, 3,184 UTI-4)

The tandem two-seat trainer accounted for very nearly a third of all I-16 production and taught most of the Soviet fighter pilots of the early war. Alongside it ran the I-16SPB and Zveno parasite dive bombers, the turbocharged I-16TK that reached 494 km/h at 8,600 m without entering production, and various pressure-cabin and ramjet experiments.

Export, licence and captured service (1936–53)

No foreign licence except Spain, where the Republic built fourteen aircraft under a 1937 agreement and Nationalist Spain flew 52 captured machines until 1953. China received at least 215 up to 1941 and built about 32 copies, calling the type Yanzi, the swallow; Plant No. 600 at Urumqi assembled Soviet kits, 111 Type 24s being flown out to Alma-Ata by September 1941. Mongolia had 30. Finland flew seven captured aircraft, Germany a handful for training and liaison, and Romania used a single captured Type 29 as a dissimilar sparring partner.

Survivors, stated precisely, because the flying aircraft are almost universally mislabelled. Original airframes are few and all are static. The Central Naval Museum in St Petersburg holds Type 28 No. 2821395, the aircraft flown by the twice Hero of the Soviet Union Boris Safonov, which fell four to five metres during the museum’s 2012 move, was badly damaged and has since been restored. Type 5 No. 5210708 is in the Chkalov Memorial Museum at Chkalovsk, and Type 5 No. 521A124, recovered in 1980 from a site 55 km from Murmansk, is in the Northern Fleet Air Force Museum at Safonovo. A UTI-4 trainer survives in the Finnish Aviation Museum. The Chinese Aviation Museum at Datangshan and the museum at Monino display aircraft built up around original components rather than complete original machines. Now the flyers, and the distinction matters: in the early 1990s Sir Tim Wallis and Ray Mulqueen of New Zealand located the crash sites of six I-16s shot down in 1941–42 and had them rebuilt at the Novosibirsk aircraft plant, alongside three I-153s, the last arriving in New Zealand in 1999. Russian accounts are blunt that in practice only some instruments from the wrecks were reused; these are new-build airframes carrying recovered identities and a small number of original parts, not restored original aeroplanes. None uses an original engine: all fly on geared Shvetsov ASh-62IR radials taken from the An-2, where the wartime M-62 and M-63 drove their propellers direct, and the mismatched propeller leaves the rebuilds slower and worse-climbing than the originals they represent. Two, ZK-JIN and ZK-JIO, stayed at Wanaka; ZK-JIQ became N7459 with the Flying Heritage collection in 1998, ZK-JIP became N30425 and went to Midland, Texas in 2002, ZK-JIR became N1639P with the Military Aviation Museum at Virginia Beach in 2003, and ZK-JJC went to Spain in 2005. A seventh was later completed for the American collector Jerry Yagen, and further examples on the German and Russian civil registers come from the same Novosibirsk programme. Any photograph captioned as a restored I-16 in flight is, on present evidence, a photograph of a 1990s Novosibirsk airframe.

From design bureau to the Eastern Front

From the front: twelve I-16 stories

The I-16 in pictures

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The I-16 in motion

A verified documentary feature for the I-16 is still being sourced — video coming soon. In the meantime, explore the photo gallery and stories above.

Where the I-16 flew

The score that defines it

The I-16 was a first-generation monoplane thrown into a decade of war — Spain, China, Mongolia and the Eastern Front. Its record is one of pioneering firsts and stubborn endurance rather than a tidy kill tally: it dominated the biplanes it first met, pioneered the air-to-air rocket, and fought on long after newer fighters had passed it by.

Compare the combat record of every military aircraft. Figures are commonly cited estimates.

Everything people ask about the I-16

Continue the tour

Every fact, checked

• History of War — Polikarpov I-16Development, variant table, and combat numbers for Spain, China, Khalkhin Gol and Barbarossa.
• Naval Encyclopedia — Polikarpov I-16Design significance, handling and the “Ishak” nickname, plus naval-aviation service and operators.
• Military Aviation MuseumPolikarpov’s imprisonment, the “first monoplane with retractable gear” claim, and restoration history.
• Warbirds Resource GroupFirst-flight chronology, Chkalov’s spin testing, and Spain and China delivery figures.
• Liquisearch — I-16 Type 24 specificationsDimensions, weights, M-63 power, speed, ceiling, range and armament data.
• Vintage Aviation NewsThe Alpine Fighter Collection remanufacture of I-16s from Karelian wrecks and today’s flying examples.
• Iron Dice — The Little Ishak That CouldNickname origins, 1941 front-line strength, and turn-fighting tactics against the Bf 109.
• gw2ru — Donkey, Rat and FlyThe nicknames and the aircraft’s twitchy handling character.