Amet-khan Sultan (Crimean Tatar: Amet-Han Sultan, Амет-Хан Султан, احمدخان سلطان; Russian: Амет-Хан Султан; 20 October 1920 – 1 February 1971) was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace in the Soviet Air Force with 30 personal and 19 shared kills who was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Despite having been able to avoid deportation to Uzbekistan when the entire Crimean Tatar nation was repressed in 1944 due to his father's Lak background, he refused to change his passport nationality listing to Lak or identify as one throughout his entire life despite pressure from government organs. After the end of the war, he worked as a test pilot at the Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky and mastered piloting 96 different aircraft types before he was killed in a crash while testing a new engine on a modified Tupolev Tu-16 bomber. He remains memorialized throughout Ukraine and Russia, with streets, schools, and airports named after him as well as a museum dedicated to his memory.
Early life
Amet-Khan Sultan was born on 20 October 1920 to a Crimean Tatar mother and a Lak father in Alupka, Crimea, then part of the short-lived state of South Russia (now Ukraine) during the Russian Civil War. In 1937, he graduated from secondary school and later studied at the railworker's school in Simferopol as well as at the aeroclub based at Zavodskoe Airport, where he graduated from flight training in 1938 while he was employed as a fitter at a local railway depot. In February 1939, he joined the Red Army and was sent for further training at the Kacha Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots, which he graduated from in 1940, and was assigned to the 122nd Fighter Aviation Regiment. Amet-khan's name would occasionally attract mockery from his peers, but he himself would often poke fun at his name, joking that "I myself am both the Khan and the Sultan." Most of his friends and family would refer to him as Amet-khan, not Sultan.
In World War II
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Amet-khan was a pilot in the 4th Fighter Aviation Regiment and immediately deployed to the front lines to carry out defensive sorties flying the obsolete Polikarpov I-153 over Rostov-on-Don. In winter 1942 after suffering high casualties the regiment was retrained and taught to fly the newer Hawker Hurricane. In March 1942, the regiment was deployed to defend the city of Yaroslavl, during which Amet-khan scored his first aerial victory on 31 May 1942. He rammed a Junkers-88 bomber with his fighter after running out of ammunition, striking it on the left wing head-on while flying upwards and slicing off the wing. He managed to jump out of his burning plane and parachute to the ground, with minor injuries to his arm and head, some from having slammed his head into the dashboard of the cockpit. He landed on a farm where a worker pointed a pitchfork at him because the worker was worried Amet-khan was one of the Luftwaffe pilots, but after folding over his pilot's coat and showing the farmer his Order of the Red Star they showed him respect and inspected the site where the planes fell. The two pilots of the Ju 88 were identified by villagers while Amet-khan rested. Amet-khan stayed on that farm for a night to recover and was visited by the regiment commissar, who woke him up and congratulated him on his successful attack. He soon returned to his regiment to fly again after a brief stay in the hospital, where he came to be teased by several of his fellow pilots for ramming his plane upwards instead of ramming downward and smashing only the landing gear of the plane against the Ju 88, which might have enabled him to make a belly-landing and walk away without a scratch. The bomber turned out to have been on a reconnaissance mission, making the sacrifice of his plane less of a loss to the Soviet Air Force. For the victory he was presented with an engraved watch in the Yaroslavl city square and later awarded the Order of Lenin.