This Soviet female pilot’s record stood unbroken for 38 years
On the morning of July 6, 1939, at the Tushino Airfield in Moscow, an R-5 aircraft lifted a ‘Rot-Front-7’ glider to an altitude of 1,000 meters. At the controls was Olga Klepikova, an instructor at the Central Aero Club.
The 1930s were the heyday of gliding – the sport of flying unpowered aircraft that relied on aerodynamic lift. At that time, the Soviet Union had 150 flight schools training future pilots and gliding competitions were annually held in Crimea. Many designers worked on creating new models, including Oleg Antonov, who developed the ‘Rot-Front’ series. It was in these "birds" that distance records had already been broken twice; now, a new one was to be set by Olga Klepikova..
As soon as the aircraft was uncoupled, the pilot set a course for Stalingrad. She spent eight hours and 25 minutes in the air, covering a distance of 749.2 km – an incredible feat at the time – and setting an absolute world record. The previous record for the longest non-stop glider flight belonged to pilot Evgenia Prokhorova and was just 343 km.
During World War II, Olga Klepikova served as a flight instructor and was the only woman to test combat aircraft at factories in Rostov-on-Don and Kazan.
Men were able to break the record set by the Soviet female pilot only 12 years later. In 1951, American Richard Johnson flew a Ross-Johnson ‘RJ-5’ glider non-stop for a distance of 861 km. Among women, however, Olga Klepikova’s achievement remained unsurpassed for a full 38 years. It was not until 1977 that Polish glider pilot Adela Dankowska managed to cover a distance of 837 km in an ‘SZD-38’ Jantar 1 glider.
