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Rockets and People
people who wanted to fly. Petr Lozovskiy, the factory test pilot, was an instructor
at the school on a volunteer basis.
The school trained pilots without taking them away from the production line.
The Komsomol Committee devoted particular attention to the flight school,
supporting the initiative of the school’s chief in every possible way. Zalmanov
enjoyed particular favor with Gorbunov, who found the means to acquire flight
suits, parachutes, training planes, and everything that a flight school needed. By the
end of 1933, the school had trained more than forty amateur pilots. Many of the
school’s graduates became professional pilots.
One of the factory school graduates was Aleksey Godovikov, the son of
Nikolay Godovikov, to whom I said farewell forever before his flight in the N-209
across the North Pole to the United States on 12 August 1937.Aleksey Godovikov
died in 1942 in a ram attack on an enemy Ju-88 bomber. Not far from Academician
Korolev Street, where I live, is Godovikov Street, named in memory of pilot
and Hero of the Soviet Union A. N. Godovikov. He died during a war when the
death of pilots was seen as an unavoidable law of nature.
the factory flight school was also touched by tragic events. On a hot July
day in 1931, during a demonstration flight executing an aerobatics maneuver in an
I-4 fighter plane, Petr Lozovskiy didn’t pull out of a spin and crashed straight into
the ground.The death of the pilot, the favorite of the Komsomol members, stunned
us all.The very existence of the flight school was threatened. By then the school
already had Osoaviakhim staff instructors. Gorbunov stood up for the school, and it
continued to train young pilots.
More accessible and popular than aviation was sport parachuting. Parachute
jumping from a special tower and then from airplanes became a real craze. Being
a leader in the Komsomol organization of the OS shop, it was my duty to act as
a role model to entice the shop’s Komsomol masses into the parachuting school.
The school’s parachuting classes began under the leadership of Lyamin, who had
made more than 500 jumps, including delayed jumps.After learning how to pack
a parachute and executing several jumps from the tower, we went on a flyaround
in a U-2, impatiently waiting for the real jumps to begin from an altitude
of 800 meters.
We gathered for the first jumps on a Sunday at the factory airfield. Lyamin
himself had lined up the first five to jump. I was fourth on his list.The airfield flight
mechanic jumped first. Second was a female Komsomol activist from our shop.The
third to jump was a shock worker—an aircraft assembler.The first two jumps went
off without a hitch. On the third jump, the parachute failed to open. Completely
shaken, we ran to the site where our comrade had fallen. He was lying in the tall
grass on the bank of the Moscow River. His right hand tightly clutched the ring
of the main parachute, which he simply had not pulled. What kept him from
pulling the ring? Lyamin cautiously freed the ring from his firmly clinched, still
warm fingers.We helped him put on our dead comrade’s parachute. He persuaded
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