28 Facts About Amet-khan Sultan

Amet-khan Sultan was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace in the Soviet Air Force with 30 personal and 19 shared kills who was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Amet-khan Sultan remains memorialized throughout Ukraine and Russia, with streets, schools, and airports named after him as well as a museum dedicated to his memory.

Amet-Khan Sultan was born on 20 October 1920 to a Crimean Tatar mother and a Lak father in Alupka, Crimea, then part of the short-lived state of South Russia during the Russian Civil War.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Amet-khan was a pilot in the 4th Fighter Aviation Regiment and immediately deployed to the front lines to carry out defensive sorties flying the obsolete Polikarpov I-153 over Rostov-on-Don.

In March 1942, the regiment was deployed to defend the city of Yaroslavl, during which Amet-khan Sultan scored his first aerial victory on 31 May 1942.

Amet-khan Sultan rammed a Junkers-88 bomber with his fighter after running out of ammunition, striking it on the left wing head-on while flying upwards and slicing off the wing.

Amet-khan Sultan managed to jump out of his burning plane and parachute to the ground, with minor injuries to his arm and head, some from having slammed his head into the dashboard of the cockpit.

Amet-khan Sultan landed on a farm where a worker pointed a pitchfork at him because the worker was worried Amet-khan was one of the Luftwaffe pilots, but after folding over his pilot's coat and showing the farmer his Order of the Red Star they showed him respect and inspected the site where the planes fell.

Amet-khan Sultan stayed on that farm for a night to recover and was visited by the regiment commissar, who woke him up and congratulated him on his successful attack.

Amet-khan Sultan soon returned to his regiment to fly again after a brief stay in the hospital, where he came to be teased by several of his fellow pilots for ramming his plane upwards instead of ramming downward and smashing only the landing gear of the plane against the Ju 88, which might have enabled him to make a belly-landing and walk away without a scratch.

Amet-khan Sultan briefly piloted a Yak-1 over Voronezh that summer and did not score any aerial victories during that time, but later in the war he scored several victories while flying one.

Over Stalingrad in August 1942 Amet-khan Sultan had to parachute out of his plane for a second time after his Yak-7B was shot down.

The NKVD officer then began questioning him about his ethnic background, decided that Amet-khan Sultan was technically Dagestani, and explained that there was an order to deport the entire Crimean Tatar people and that his brother Imran was wanted for collaborating with the Germans.

Amet-khan Sultan flew a Lavochkin La-7 in the later parts of the war in campaigns over Konigsberg, Berlin, and East Prussia.

Amet-khan Sultan saved the life of one of his comrades over Konigsberg; after Chubukov and Khvostov engaged with a group of originally six fighters; two German fighters went down while taking out Khvostov, and Chubukov was surrounded by the remaining four when Amet-khan Sultan rushed toward the fighters and saved Chubukov from being shot down.

Amet-khan Sultan quickly rose through the ranks at the institute, reaching the rank of test pilot first class in 1952.

In June 1949, he and Igor Shelest carried out the first fully automatic mid-air refueling in the Soviet Union; Amet-khan Sultan piloted the Yak-15 fighter jet and Shelest flew the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber involved in the procedure.

When it was pointed out that Amet-khan Sultan nearly died while testing the KS-1 to save the prototype, it was decided that he would be awarded the Order of the Red Banner and Stalin Prize second class instead, since awarding a Crimean Tatar a third gold star was unthinkable to the internal ranks of the Soviet Union, regardless of merit.

Many of the flights Amet-khan Sultan carried out in his career were for tests of the bailout systems for military aircraft, a risky procedure.

Amet-khan Sultan died on 1 February 1971 at the age of 50 while piloting a modified Tu-16.

Amet-khan Sultan's funeral was attended by a variety of famous people from the Soviet Union, ranging from members of the Crimean Tatar civil rights movement, veterans of the war, generals, and test pilots, including Vladimir Ilyushin, Aleksey Ryazanov, and Abdraim Reshidov.

Amet-khan Sultan was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to publicly request the rehabilitation and right of return for the Crimean Tatars.

Amet-khan Sultan never lived to see the full right of return granted to the Crimean Tatars that occurred in the Perestroika era.

In 1974, a small bust of Amet-khan Sultan made by Sadri Akhun was added to his grave in Novodevichy Cemetery.

In 2010 a monument to Amet-khan Sultan's aerial ramming over Yaroslavl was installed on the ground below the site where he rammed the Ju 88.

Amet-khan Sultan was the main protagonist in the 2013 Crimean-Tatar movie Haytarma.

On October 26,2020, a monument Amet-Khan Sultan was unveiled in the center of Aqmescit.

Amet-khan Sultan was not born or raised in Dagestan and he did not speak any of the languages of Dagestan.