Sergey Ilyushin

Sergey Vladimirovich Ilyushin
Ilyushin on a 1984 Soviet postage stamp
Born	March 30, 1894 Dilyalevo, Vologda Governorate, Russian Empire
Died	February 9, 1977(1977-02-09) (aged 82) Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet Union (Russian)
Engineering career
Discipline	Aeronautical Engineering
Employer(s)	Ilyushin design bureau
Significant design	Il-2, Il-10

Sergey Vladimirovich Ilyushin (Russian: Серге́й Владимирович Илью́шин; 30 March [O.S. 18 March] 1894 – February 9, 1977) was a Soviet aircraft designer who founded the Ilyushin aircraft design bureau.

Born in the village of Dilyalevo, Vologda Governorate Russian Empire as the youngest of 11 children in a peasant family, the largely self-taught Ilyushin left home at an early age. He worked as a factory laborer, ditch-digger at construction sites, and cleaner of gutters at a dye plant in Petrograd. In 1910, he learned that jobs were available at Kolomyazhsky Racetrack as a groundskeeper. The racetrack was also the site of the first All-Russia Festival of Ballooning in autumn of 1910, and Ilyushin assisted in unpacking crates and setting up equipment. He was also able to meet many of Russia's pioneer aviators, an event that awoke his interest in aviation.

However, in 1911 he returned to his native village to work as a of a dairy plant. The following year, he worked as a construction worker for the Amur Railway, and in 1913 he was in Tallinn as a worker in a shipyard. With the outbreak of World War I, Ilyushin was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army, serving with the infantry, and later (as he was literate) as a clerk in the military administration of Vologda. When a request came for seven volunteers to serve in the fledgling Aviation Section, he was quick to volunteer. He worked at first as a mechanic and member of the ground crew. In the summer of 1917, he was qualified as a pilot. However, in March 1918, with the withdrawal of the Provisional Government from the war, he was demobilized and sent back to his native village. He helped supervise the increasing nationalization of factories in the area and in October 1918 joined the Bolshevik party. With the Russian Civil War, Ilyushin was drafted into the Red Army in May 1919 and was an aviation technician of VVS RKKA (Red Army). That autumn, a White Movement Avro 504 biplane made a forced landing near Petrozavodsk. Ilyushin led a team which dismantled it, and sent it to Moscow where it was reverse-engineered into the Soviet U-1 trainer, of which 737 examples were subsequently built.