Flying for the first time on 24 June 1927, it would be designated as the U-2 in the Soviet system of the time (U – uchebnyy, trainer), and would quickly replace the successful but outdated U-1 – itself another Polikarpov design, reverse-engineered from an Avro 504K captured in 1919 during the Russian Civil War. Gotten right straight out of the box, it was designed in 1926 by a young Nikolai Polikarpov (then aged just 34) and intended to be a cheap, simple, no-frills STOL utility aircraft that could be used for anything from basic flight training to crop dusting to reconnaissance and even combat. The only blot on the landscape really is the SR-22…įor an aircraft that would go on to be produced in more than 40,000 examples and achieve so much in both peace and war, the Po-2 had an almost disappointingly straightforward birth. Smoke ’em if you ‘got em! To make the whole scene better, there’s a homegrown Rubik R-26 Góbé glider launching in the background, pulled along by 1960s Mercedes-Benz L series winch truck.
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