Biography
Bartini was born in Fiume, Austria-Hungary (now Rijeka, Croatia). He was the son of an unmarried 17 year old girl. Her aunts and tutors, impoverished aristocrats originally from the city of Miskolc, North-East of Budapest, granted custody of the child to a peasant family. When the natural father of the child, a married man, refused to recognize the baby as his son, the young mother drowned herself.
Besides his family education, he graduated from gymnasium in 1915, was drafted and sent to officers' reserve school located in Banská Bystrica (today's Slovakia). Upon graduation in 1916, Bartini was sent to the Russian-Austrian-Hungarian front where he was captured in June 1916. He attended flying school in 1921 and Politecnico di Milano in 1922. Bartini became a member of the Italian Communist Party in 1921.
After the Fascist takeover in Italy in 1923, he was transferred undercover to the USSR as an aviation engineer. He occupied several engineering and command positions in the Soviet Air Force and Red Army. He became the head of the department of amphibious experimental aircraft design in 1928. He was the head of the design department of NII GVF, general designer (chief designer), since 1930.
He was imprisoned from 1938 to 1946. He continued his work on new aircraft designs as a prisoner in TsKB 29 NKVD and in OKB-86 on the territory of Dimitrov Aircraft Factory and Beriev Aircraft Company in Taganrog (1946–1952), then in SibNIA, Novosibirsk. R.L.Bartini was rehabilitated in 1956.
He also published papers concerning aviation construction materials and technology, aerodynamics, dynamics of flight, and even theoretical physics.
He died in Moscow, Russia in 1974.
Read more about this topic: Robert Ludvigovich Bartini
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