Overview

For more than eight decades, Ilyushin aircraft have carried the physical weight of empires, wars, disasters, and daily life across some of the harshest and most inaccessible landscapes on Earth. From the smoking ruins of the Second World War to the frozen airfields of the Arctic and the humanitarian corridors of the modern world, Ilyushin's transports and airliners became the silent backbone of Eastern aviation power. This book tells, for the first time in one continuous narrative, the complete story of how a single design bureau shaped military mobility, civil air travel, and global heavy lift from the heart of Eurasia to every corner of the developing world. Ilyushin Workhorses traces the rise of Soviet transport aviation, the birth of legendary aircraft such as the Il-12, Il-18, Il-62, and Il-76, and the transformation of these machines into instruments of war, diplomacy, and humanitarian survival. It explores how Ilyushin's aircraft moved armies across continents, rebuilt shattered nations after global conflict, sustained isolated regions where no roads existed, and delivered lifesaving aid into disaster zones that no other aircraft could reach. The book follows the bureau through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shock of market upheaval, and the renewed struggle for industrial independence under modern geopolitical pressure. Blending strategic history, industrial evolution, and the human consequences of airlift, this definitive account reveals why Ilyushin never simply built airplanes-it built the infrastructure of movement for an entire civilization. Rugged, uncompromising, and enduring, Ilyushin's workhorses reshaped not only Eastern aviation, but the very meaning of air transport under conditions where failure was never an option.

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