To improve the quality and quantity of articles documenting all aspects of aviation in the USSR, including notable pilots, major accidents, airports, and domestically produced aircraft.
Scope
Articles dealing with any of the following topics:
Aviation accidents and incidents that took place in the Soviet Union, especially before glasnost
Aviation accidents and incidents that involved Soviet-made aircraft (even if it didn't crash in the Soviet Union)
The project currently intends to work on improving the article on Amet-khan Sultan so that it reaches featured status. We are awaiting the publication of his full biography by historian Andrey Simonov in the future, so until we can use that book as a source in the bibliography we will be:
Creating articles on topics related to Amet-khan and the biographies of his colleagues so that there are more interwiki links to the article
For air crashes, notability based on news coverage at the time is a little different because it was standard procedure in the USSR to censor news coverage of any mention of aviation accidents, hence such accidents are rarely mentioned in newspaper archives. If the accident would have attracted major news coverage and notability in a situation without censorship, then it can be considered notable.
Any article related to this task force should be marked by adding Soviet=yes to the ((WPAVIATION)) project banner at the top of its talk page. This will automatically place it into Category:Soviet aviation task force articles. You can also add this to the talk page of images, categories, and templates. Cut and paste this code: ((WikiProject Aviation|Soviet=yes))
Below is a list of sources that are generally unreliable or contain many errors.
Polak, Tomas; Shores, Christopher (1999). Stalin's Falcons. Grub Street. ISBN9781902304014. - The author cites a variety of questionable sources for the book in the foreward (like Soviet memoirs) and many official documents were not yet declassified at the time the book was published. Even simple things like the year of birth can be off by five years. Pilots’ scores are often heavily inflated, and even information about awards can be incorrect. Some of his false claims include: that Amet-khan Sultan was born in 1925 (and then did an aerial ramming at age 16!); that Lidya Litvyak was only awarded the Order of the Red Banner when alive (she received the Order of the Red Star when she was alive and was seen wearing the medal!); that Lev Shestakov had 65 total victories (a number that appears to be made up and does not correspond to or even resemble any other estimates!).
Books from the "aircraft of the aces" series - often contain errors, use with caution and confirm with other sources. Tends to inflate the scores of pilots sometimes. Biographical details like date of birth and death are generally correct, but breakdowns of victories and descriptions of specific flight incidents are not always supported by historical consensus. Accuracy varies between authors and subject area.
The airaces.ru website contains "biographies" of many pilots that describes alleged flying aces (who are not considered official flying aces by reliable sources) using old and debunked sources or even dramatized essay-memiors as the primary source of an article. Should be avoided whenever possible. Better to use a different website with a similar idea - soviet-aces-1936-53.ru - instead, since it has more reliable information.
We encourage all members of Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation to use the translation feature more often. There are many articles that can be created or expanded via translation.