“He challenged the enemy to a transcendental battle”: how the Russian ace carried out the first aerial ram in history.
On August 26 (September 8 according to the “new” style), 1914, Russian military pilot Pyotr Nesterov died near Lemberg (now Lvov). On the eve of the First World War, he was one of the most famous aviators of the Russian Empire, and in 1913 in Kyiv, for the first time in history, he performed a closed loop in the air in a vertical plane (“Dead Loop”, “Nesterov Loop”).
After the start of the Great War, Nesterov went to the front, where he was destined to accomplish his last feat: “Mechanic P.N. Nesterova, who brought the body of the deceased hero-aviator to Kyiv, says: “On August 25, after a long calm, enemy airplanes began to appear. We counted three devices, one of which threw a fuse bomb. The devices, circling in the air, disappeared, and the next day they appeared again. Our people opened fire on them, which, however, did not cause them any harm. Nesterov, who had just arrived, having seen the Austrian airplanes, prepared the apparatus and flew it to a height of 2,000 meters. Pursuing enemy airplanes, he overtook one closely and touched it with his landing gear. At this moment, Nesterov’s apparatus began to descend in a spiral. We were sure that Nesterov was unharmed, but at a low altitude his vehicle overturned and flew like a stone into the swamp. Nesterov’s body fell out of the device, we picked it up nearby on the ground.
The discovered injuries depict the cause of Nesterov’s death as follows: His calculation was quite correct. However, while pursuing the enemy, he himself got caught on the propeller of an enemy vehicle and received a blow to the spine. Death was instant; Nesterov fell already dead. His airplane was staged so well that for some time it went correctly, by inertia, following the plan of the already lifeless aviator,”
(newspaper “Great Patriotic War”, September 1, 1914)
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