A man with many origins

Even Bartini’s birth is a puzzle. Born in Fiume in 1897, he gave widely varying accounts of his parents, hinting at Hungarian nobility. After capture on the Eastern Front and years in a Siberian camp, he joined the Italian Communist Party, studied at the Politecnico di Milano, and after the Fascist takeover of 1922 was sent to the Soviet Union, where he was nicknamed the Red Baron. Bartini had studied aeronautics at Milan and attended flying school in 1921.

Steel aeroplanes and a prison bureau

In the 1930s Bartini designed the Stal (steel) series. The Stal-6 fighter set a Soviet speed record in 1933, and the twin-engined Stal-7 airliner later flew 5,068 km non-stop at an average 405 km/h. In 1938 he was arrested as a supposed Italian spy and sentenced to ten years. He kept working in prison design bureaux, alongside Andrei Tupolev on the Tu-2, then led his own bureau, OKB-86, in Omsk. Meanwhile his Stal-7 became the Yermolayev Yer-2 bomber.

Ground-effect dreams

Released in 1946 and rehabilitated in 1956, Bartini turned to ekranoplans, craft that fly in ground effect. His last project, the VVA-14, was meant to hunt Polaris submarines; its first prototype flew on 4 September 1972. Bartini died in Moscow in 1974, and the project faded. Sergei Korolev called him his teacher, and asteroid 4982 Bartini bears his name. The Bartini effect, a drag-reducing tandem propeller arrangement first used on his DAR flying boat, is also named after him.

Люди

• Robert Bartini · designer — Born Fiume 1897, died Moscow 1974; Order of Lenin 1967
• Nikolai Shebanov · test pilot — Flew the Stal-7 from spring 1935
• Vladimir Yermolayev · designer — Repaired the Stal-7 and developed it into the Yer-2

Рекорды и первые достижения

• Stal-6 set a Soviet speed record, 1933
• Stal-7 flew 5,068 km non-stop Moscow–Sverdlovsk–Sevastopol–Moscow at 405 km/h average, 28 August 1939