Dmitriev, Victor
Victor Dmitriev was a teacher, truck driv-er, and aviation enthusiast in the Soviet Union. He pored over ev-ery bit of available information on American sport planes and taught himself how to design aircraft when the Soviet state considered such knowledge secret. Over the course of 24 years he built 30 aircraft, scrounging materials from the trash, now and then buying real air-craft parts through an illegal under-ground network. He modified a Czechoslovakian motorcycle engine for an airplane power plant. His design studio, assembly plant, and hangar were all located in the four room apartment his family shared with two others in Beslickek (formerly Frunze) in Kirghizia, a republic be-tween Kazakhstan and China. |