Pyotr Nikolayevich Nesterov (February 15 [27], 1887, Nizhny Novgorod — August 26 [September 8], 1914, near Zholkva, now in Lviv Oblast) was a Russian military pilot, staff captain, and founder of aerobatics. A native of Nizhny Novgorod, he was a student at the Nizhny Novgorod Cadet Corps. He was the first in the world to perform a "dead loop" and the first in the world to use an aerial ramming attack in combat.[1]

The Nizhny Novgorod Years

Pyotr Nesterov was born on February 15 (27), 1887, in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin, in an apartment attached to the cadet corps where his father, the officer-tutor Nikolay Fyodorovich Nesterov, served.[2] In 1890 his father died at the age of 27, and his mother, Margarita Viktorovna, moved with her four children into the Widows' House.[3] In 1896 the nine-year-old Pyotr visited the All-Russian Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, where he was taken up in a gas balloon — according to family tradition, the impression of that flight determined his future path.[3] In 1897 he entered the Nizhny Novgorod Cadet Corps and graduated in 1904 among its best students.[3]

In the summer of 1911 Nesterov returned to Nizhny Novgorod on leave and, together with Pyotr Petrovich Sokolov — a student of Professor N. Ye. Zhukovsky — built a glider that rose 2–3 meters above the ground. This was his first flying experience.[3]

Military Career and Aviation Achievements

After the cadet corps, Nesterov graduated from the Mikhailovsky Artillery School in Saint Petersburg (1906) and was posted to Vladivostok, where he developed rules for adjusting artillery fire from a balloon.[3] In 1910, for health reasons (weak lungs), he was transferred to the Caucasus, where he finally resolved to become a pilot.[3] From October 1911 he studied at the officers' aeronautics school in Saint Petersburg; on September 12, 1912, he made his first solo flight and passed the examinations for the titles of pilot-aviator and military pilot.[3]

In 1913 he received an assignment to an air detachment being formed in Kyiv under the 7th Aeronautical Company, and then became commander of the 11th Corps Air Detachment.[1] Nesterov was the first among Russian aviators to begin performing banked turns, laying the foundation for maneuver flying.[3] On August 27, 1913, over Kyiv, he performed the world's first closed loop in the vertical plane — a maneuver that went down in history as the "Nesterov loop."[1] In 1913–1914 he completed record-setting group flights along the routes Kyiv — Odessa — Sevastopol and Kyiv — Gatchina; aerial photography and filming were carried out for the first time from his aircraft.[2]

Death

With the outbreak of the First World War, Nesterov fought on the Southwestern Front. He was one of the first to use aerial bombing and flew 28 combat sorties.[3] On August 26 (September 8), 1914, near Zhovkva, flying a Morane aircraft, he rammed and shot down an Austro-Hungarian Albatros carrying the pilot Franz Malina and the pilot-observer Baron Friedrich von Rosenthal. All participants in the collision were killed. Nesterov, like his father, was 27 years old.[3] He was buried in Kyiv.[1]

Memory in Nizhny Novgorod

The house in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin (Building 2) where the pilot was born was built in the 1780s to a design by the architect Yakov Ananyevich Ananyin. In the late 19th century the building housed a cadet corps with apartments for its teachers.[2] In the city, a street running from Kovalikhinskaya Street to the Verkhne-Volzhskaya Embankment is named after Nesterov.

Sources

  1. dic.academic.ru — Nesterov Pyotr Nikolayevich — what is Nesterov Pyotr Nikolayevich?
  2. nizhny800.ru — The house in which the pilot Pyotr Nikolayevich Nesterov was born in 1887
  3. vuc.urfu.ru — Pyotr Nikolayevich Nesterov