Aircraft · Soviet Union · 1934-1943
Polikarpov I-16
fighter
The world's first cantilever-winged monoplane fighter with retractable landing gear to reach mass production, the stubby, tricky-to-fly I-16 was the mainstay of Soviet fighter aviation through the late 1930s and into the first months of Barbarossa, by which time it was hopelessly outclassed by the Bf 109 and was destroyed on the ground in the hundreds in June 1941.
| crew | 1 |
|---|---|
| top speed | 489 km/h |
| armament | 2-4x machine guns or cannon |
| produced | ~10,000 |
