November 2 1938 years
Pilots Valentina Grizodubova, Polina Osipenko, and Marina Raskova were awarded Heroes of the Soviet Union for their nonstop flight from Moscow to the Far East.
In a converted ANT-37 bomber, they flew 6450 km in 26 hours and 29 minutes. Without radio communications or maps, and suddenly running out of fuel, they managed to land the plane, named "Rodina," in a swamp near the Amgun River, with minimal damage. The flight became a women's world record for longest flight.
Three months earlier, the all-male crew of Kokkinaki-Bryandinsky completed a nonstop flight from Moscow to Spassk-Dalny. The all-female crew for the new record was selected based on merit. They were diverse.
She became the captain of the crew Valentina GrizodubovaThe daughter of a Kharkiv inventor first flew with her father at age two. By the mid-1930s, she was already a record-holder among women piloting light aircraft.
Polina Osipenko She spent half her life working as a poultry farmer, then married a pilot and enrolled in flight school herself. She set several world records in high-altitude flights.
The navigator in the team was a theoretician - Marina RaskovaLecturer at the Air Academy. NKVD officer.
We took off from Moscow on September 24th. Almost immediately, contact with the ground was lost. The pressure difference in the air blew all the flight charts out of the navigator's open window.
“So our plane became not only deaf, but also blind,” remembered Grizodubova.
On the morning of the 25th, we sighted the Sea of Okhotsk. We made a 180-degree turn toward Khabarovsk. But four hours earlier, we ran out of fuel. An emergency landing would have been dangerous for the navigator in the front seat, so Raskova was forced to bail out.
Rodina was discovered on October 3rd. On the 4th, two aircraft participating in the rescue operation collided in mid-air. At least 15 people died.
The pilots' fates were different. Osipenko died in 1939 while testing a new fighter. Raskova, having risen to the rank of senior lieutenant in the State Security Service, died during the war. Grizodubova worked at a research institute after the war. Attending receptions in the Kremlin, she pleaded on behalf of the repressed: "It's a division of labor. Marina was putting people in jail. And I was saving them."
