About

'Planes in Profile' is a project that unites my life-long passion for single-seater vintage aircraft (especially WW2 fighters) with the skills I've picked up throughout the many years as an illustrator. Combining these forces, I aim to visually revive some of history's long-lost airplanes in the form of well researched and detailed four-view profile artworks, and present them to you along with my research notes and thoughts, as well as any other available information associated with those individual airplanes. The goal is to give each of these planes their own ‘Profile Page’ - a space on the internet dedicated to them. My hope is that my efforts will produce an informative resource for those who are enthusiastic about aviation history or scale modelling of aircraft of the highly innovative 30 year period between the 1920s and 1950s – and a pleasant visual experience for those who appreciate airplane profile art :)

This project took off in 2020, supercharged by inspiration from amazing airplane profile artists such as Ronnie Olsthoorn and Claes Sundin (whose art prints and books I highly recommend!), and work by people such as Massimo Tessitory. It was also driven by my desire to answer questions, which I always have when looking at an old b/w photo or at a single-sided profile artwork of an airplane. Questions such as: What did the airplane look like from the other side, or from above and below? How did the artist come to their conclusions? Where is the photo reference for the profile artwork? And of course, some of the more obvious questions, such as what is the history behind this airplane? Who flew it and how many victories did they score in it? What makes this airplane special? And so on…

‘Planes in Profile’ is where I attempt to answer such questions to the best of my abilities and I hope that these answers will save you time if you will happen to be researching any of these planes yourselves.

So, welcome to ‘Planes in Profile’ and I hope you will find this project informative and aesthetically pleasing :)

Anton

Why does the website contain mostly Soviet FIGHTER planes?

As you can tell by the work on ‘Planes In Profile’ thus far, I have started the website with the fighters of the Soviet VVS (VVS stands for 'Voyenno Vozdushniye Sily' which directly translates to 'Military Air Forces' ). There are a few reasons for this:

1. I was born and spent my childhood in the Soviet Union (mainly in eastern and southern Ukraine), growing up with war recollections told to me by my grandmother (a war veteran) and with war songs she sung to me as lullabies. The Great Patriotic War carved enormous scars into the memories of the Soviet people (especially Ukrainians, since the entire territory of Ukraine fell within the proposed “Lebensraum” and was consequently entirely overrun by the Wehrmacht).

Therefore, the victory over Nazi Germany has been fervently commemorated in post-war Soviet society. So I (like most Soviet children, I suppose) have developed a special fondness for Soviet military subjects from an early age. I guess, rather than making this into a long story, I should probably just say that the first reason I especially like Soviet fighter planes is because these planes and I were both “Made in USSR”.

2. Because I speak Russian, and a bit of Ukrainian, I have more literature and research available to me when it comes to the topic of Soviet VVS. Occasionally, I have even been able to get in touch with some Russian-speaking researchers to get their opinions. After that, I was able to synthesise, translate and pass that information on to you through my artwork and research notes.

3. It feels to me that some Westerners are not very familiar with the air war over the Eastern Front and, by extension, with the ‘Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945’ in general. This is somewhat understandable since we, in the Anglo-American world, usually prefer to learn about the parts of the war that involved our countries directly (the same can be said for those who lived in the USSR). So, it’s no wonder most Westerners, when they think of WW2, generally think of the Battle of Britain, Western Europe, North Africa and, of course, the Pacific theatre, rather than of the Eastern Front or the Sino-Japanese war ( which I’ll leave out for now). I feel that, in my own little way, I can help to create more awareness of the Great Patriotic War, the heroes it produced and the machines they flew. Here is a little bit about this enormous conflict:

Великая Отечественная Война , which in the West is usually referred to as ‘The Great Patriotic War’ (although, a more literal translation would be ‘The Great War of the Fatherland’), is what the Soviet people called the conflict that erupted on the 22nd of June 1941 when Germany invaded the USSR and that ended on the 9th of May 1945 – for the USSR but the 8th of May for others – when the capitulation of the German army was complete. It was predominantly a conflict between Germany and the USSR – between two ideologically charged countries and between two dictators, both of whom had little regard for the value of human life and both of whom had ‘de-humanised’ the other side through propaganda. This exploded into the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century when Hitler’s soldiers crossed Soviet borders with the largest invasion force in known history, a force that accounted for about 80% of the German army [1] and numbered more than 4 million personnel if we include other Axis powers that joined Germany in this invasion [2]. From that day until the end of the war, no less than 75% of the German army was concentrated on the Eastern Front[3]. In other words, for four years after June 1941, The Eastern Front, aka ‘The Great Patriotic War’, was Hitler’s main war.

This ruthless clash of giants led to some of the largest and most ferocious battles the world has ever seen, on land and in the sky. The ‘Battle of Kursk’ is one such battle. Though often considered as the largest tank battle in history, the fights in the skies above Kursk are generally overlooked. But based on the number of aircraft amassed for the Kursk battle (around 2500 planes on the German side and more than 2,600 on the Soviet side [4] ), it makes Kursk one of the largest, if not THE largest air battle in history, in theory.

‘Great Patriotic War’ produced the highest-scoring fighter Aces of all time on the Allied and Axis sides, including a Soviet (Ukrainian) fighter pilot Ivan Kozhedub - the world’s top-scoring Allied fighter Ace (based on personal air victories) – and a German fighter pilot Erich Hartmann - the world’s top-scoring Axis fighter Ace (as well as the top-scoring overall). In fact, the 10 top-scoring Allied fighter pilots were all Soviet pilots on the Eastern Front. Mikhail Bykov, the author of ‘All of Stalin’s Aces’ , told me the USSR had just over 3000 Soviet Aces fighting in WW2 [5]. The majority of the top-scoring German fighter pilots made a name for themselves on the Eastern Front also. The top 5 German fighter Aces, (Hartmann, Barkhorn, Rall, Kittel and Nowotny - the highest-scoring Aces of all time), all fought and scored their victories almost entirely on the Eastern Front – in other words, in the Great Patriotic War.

For the Germans, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was the costliest conflict of WW2. It is the conflict that crippled their army beyond repair and turned the tide of war in favour of the Allies. To put it in perspective, 80% of the German army’s deaths (that’s 4 out of every 5 soldiers) occurred on the Eastern Front [6], with 76% of all German deaths inflicted by the USSR [7]. In the Battle for Stalingrad alone, close to as many German soldiers were eliminated by the Soviets as the number of German soldiers killed fighting the British, French and Americans throughout the whole of WW2 on the Western Front, combined, by some estimates. And this is just one battle of the Great Patriotic War.

I am writing this not to downplay the enormous efforts, contributions and heroic sacrifices that the US, UK and other Allies made towards defeating Hitler’s armies. These sacrifices were crucial to ensuring Allied victory in Europe, not to mention the North African theatre where German defeats were wholly due to the efforts of the Western Allies. I am writing this instead to show the overwhelming impact the USSR (along with Poland , Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European nations) played in defeating Nazi Germany, to raise awareness of these facts and try to convey why I chose Soviet fighter planes as my starting point.

To be fair, roughly about 19% [8] of the “SOVIET” fighter planes were actually not Soviet-made – they were American and British-made planes flown by Soviet pilots as a result of the Lend-Lease program. A good example of this are some of the highest-scoring Allied Fighter Aces of WW2, A. Pokryshkin and G. Rechkalov, who both flew American-made Bell P-39 Airacobras and scored the majority of their victories flying these machines. No doubt some of these great planes will be featured on Planes in Profile eventually, especially if the support for this project will grow :)

(By the way, a really well made infographic to watch, which puts into perspective the spine-chilling price (in human lives) paid by the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany in WW2 can be found HERE. I highly recommend watching it. Seriously, it’s worth it!)

Having expressed why I felt compelled to start this project with Soviet fighter planes, I should mention that my passion is not limited to Soviet fighter planes only ( of course!) or even to fighter planes alone. I am looking forward to creating profile pages for airplanes from other nations, both Allied and Axis, and eventually even starting a section where I hope to profile some of the beautiful vintage racer planes too! After all, many WW2 fighter planes have a bit of a ‘racer plane’ in their ancestral ‘blood line’. So, watch this space:)

Why do I use links to photos, instead of just using photos?

Most artwork and photos are protected by copyright law and some airplane photos of the WW2 period are no exception. Where possible, I try to find the owner of the photo or video and ask them for permission to use their image, but most of the time finding the copyright owner of a photograph is virtually impossible. Even when I do find the owner, sometimes they just don’t get back to me because they have bigger things to do. An example of this are Mosfilm’s photos/videos of Mig-3s from 1943-44, from the Movie ‘Sky of Moskow’ . Mosfilm is among the largest and oldest movie studios in Europe and they haven’t been responding to me in regards to whether I can use images from their 1944 movie on this website. Even if most of the photos are free to use under the ‘Fair use’ law, it only takes one of them to create copyright issues and I would prefer to not create any issues of that nature. For this reason, I have resorted to using ‘links’ rather than photos. In some ways, I actually think this might be better because it helps you to see exactly where the original image or article resides so that you can explore those sources further if you wish.

Why do I Encourage People to join ‘planes in profile’ on Patreon?

At the time of writing, the only benefit I get from working on ‘Planes in Profile’ is that I get to do something I really enjoy. This is my personal project and I work on it in my free time, outside of my full-time ‘paid’ job. All the books, the website and other expenses associated with this project are paid by me out of my own pocket.

The effort that goes into creating each of the Profile Pages requires huge amounts of time to research, evaluate and synthesise the information into a coherent and sound conclusion, not to mention the countless hours spent on painstakingly crafting the artwork, taking into account as much detail as possible. Displaying the planes in four views means that 3-4 profiles have to be created for each airplane. The reason I do this is because I think it will provide a much more comprehensive source of information for you if you happen to be researching any of the planes I’ve drawn. But, like I said, it takes up a lot of time, so any financial contributions I can get to help me cover a little bit of that time, as well as some of those expenses, will really help.

So, if any of you reading this enjoyed looking through this website and would like this project to “stay in the air” so you can be supplied with more well-researched and aesthetically-pleasing airplane profiles regularly , please consider supporting it at https://www.patreon.com/planesinprofile , where you will get immediate access to more content which is exclusive to Patreon supporters.

I am currently trying to supply at least one full, four-view airplane profile per month to my Patreon supporters. If the support grows, I will aim for more airplane profiles at a faster rate.

Thanks so much for reading all the way to the end! Looking forward to e-meeting you and hearing your comments and suggestions. In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy this website! :)

[1] This is taken from ‘Forces’ section of the following Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_%28World_War_II%29
[2] Taken from a video by Dr. David Stahel https://youtu.be/KxsdfcgfSS8?t=1685
[3]This is taken from various sources including the following video: https://youtu.be/KxsdfcgfSS8?t=1799  
[4] The number of airplanes was taken from https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-kursk
[5] The book lists Air Aces with confirmed victories, personal and shared victories combined. According to M/Bykov, based on confirmed victories, there are just over 3000 Soviet aces who fought in WW2. This includes pilots who were already aces by the time they started participating in WW2, or had their earlier victories from other conflicts (such as the Spanish Civil War, The Winter War, or the Battles of Khalkhin Gol) contribute to their ‘Ace’ status.
[6] Taken from Wikipedia. Original source is : Duiker, William J. (2015). "The Crisis Deepens: The Outbreak of World War II". Contemporary World History(sixth ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 138
[7] This is according to Antony Beevor in a video timestamped here https://youtu.be/AZErCVlIDJg?t=196
[8] This info is according to a video by Military Aviation History https://youtu.be/SLTR8qeTOIs?t=830