One broken flying boat

Dmitry Grigorovich came to aircraft sideways. Born in Kiev in 1883 and educated at the Kiev Polytechnic and in Liège, he moved to St Petersburg in 1911 and edited an aviation journal. From 1912 he was technical director of S. S. Shchetinin’s First Russian Aeronautics Company. In 1913 a Donnet-Lévêque flying boat arrived for repairs to its nose. Grigorovich studied it, and his improved copy became the M-1, the first of a long line of Russian flying boats.

The M-series

The M-5 of 1915 was the first flying boat mass-produced in Russia, with about 300 built for the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. The heavier M-9 followed, about 500 strong; in September 1916 naval pilot Jan Nagórski looped one, the first loop in a flying boat. Grigorovich’s M-11 was the world’s first flying-boat fighter. In July 1917 he took over a works split off from Shchetinin’s, only for it to be nationalised in 1918.

Designing in a prison

Under the Soviets he designed the I-1 and I-2 fighters at Moscow’s Factory No. 1 and organised naval prototype work in Leningrad. On 31 August 1928 the OGPU arrested him; sentenced to ten years, he worked with Nikolai Polikarpov in a prison design bureau, the TsKB-39, where in April 1930 they produced the I-5 fighter. Amnestied in 1931, he went on designing attack aircraft and teaching at the Moscow Aviation Institute until his death from cancer in 1938. He was rehabilitated in 1993.

工場

• Shchetinin works · St Petersburg — First Russian Aeronautics Company of S. S. Shchetinin
• Factory No. 1 (ex-Dux) · Moscow — Design bureau from 1922
• Krasny Lyotchik · Leningrad — Former Gamayun works, from 1924

人々

• Dmitry Pavlovich Grigorovich · designer — 1883–1938
• S. S. Shchetinin · factory owner
• Jan Nagórski · naval pilot — First loop in a flying boat, M-9, 1916
• ニコライ・ポリカルポフ · fellow prisoner-designer — Co-designed the I-5

記録と初記録

• First loop in a flying boat, M-9, 17 September 1916
• M-11: world’s first flying-boat fighter