Pilots of the Russian I-16 fighter the Squadron from the 728th IAP (Fighter Aviation Regiment) of the Red Army Air Force is I. A. Ivanenkov (right) listens to the report of Denisov the pilot of the I-16 fighter about a combat mission.
Kalinin Front of the Red Army, in January 1943.
Location: USSR
Time taken: January 1943
I-16 (TsKB-12) “sixteenth fighter” (colloquially: “Ishak”, “Ishachok”) is a Soviet single-engine monoplane fighter of the 1930s, created in the Experimental Design Bureau of aircraft designer Nikolai Polikarpov. The world’s first mass-produced monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear in flight. Before the war, the most replicated fighter in the world: by its beginning, about six thousand I-16s had been produced.
The aircraft had a predominantly wooden structure, plywood and linen sheathing. The I-16 was the main fighter of the Red Army Air Force from 1936 until the beginning of 1942.
The development of the I-16 was initially carried out on an initiative basis by specialists from Brigade No. 2 at TsKB-39, where Nikolai Nikolaevich Polikarpov was the head of the brigade. The first studies of a high-speed monoplane fighter were made in 1932. In the middle of 1933, due to difficulties in fine-tuning the I-14 (ANT-31) by P. O. Sukhoi, the Air Force leadership drew attention to the initiative project of a high-speed monoplane fighter of the Polikarpov brigade, which was called TsKB-12.