Gatchina, Where Russian Flight Learned to Walk

There's a neighbourhood in the town of Gatchina, not far from Saint Petersburg, and it's simply called Aerodrome. Apartment blocks, bus stops, courtyards. An ordinary place, until you know what's underneath it.

Once, the first military aeroplanes in Russia roared over this ground. And here a future pilot kept falling and getting up again, a man whose name is known even to people who have never read a line about aviation.

The field was flat and dry, and for centuries it was used to review cavalry. It lay right in front of the imperial palace. So the emperor could watch the newest marvel of technology without leaving his own courtyard.

Here Russia opened its first military flying school. And from this field, one after another, people began to rise into the air who had only ever seen an aeroplane as a photograph in a newspaper.

In under seven years, more than three hundred pilots were trained here.

One of them was Lydia Zvereva. She was the first Russian woman to earn a pilot's diploma. To the crowds watching from the ground, a woman at the controls of a fragile frame of wood and canvas was almost scandalous. But an engine doesn't ask who's flying. Zvereva flew, and she taught others to fly, as well as any of the male instructors.

Another student here was Pyotr Nesterov, and his name is now stuck to the word "aerobatics." He came to flying from the artillery. The theory of the day said you must never turn an aeroplane upside down. In a bank, it loses control and falls.

But he asked a simple question. If the wings keep working upside down, why not carry the turn all the way round?

He answered it later, near Kyiv, with the first loop, a manoeuvre that aviation science had called impossible. The eye and the calm in danger that he needed for it, he got here, on the Gatchina field.

Today, where the first aeroplanes ran across the grass a hundred years ago and more, there are courtyards and bus stops.

But the memory isn't locked in a museum case. It's woven into the street plan. There's a street named for Zvereva, the aviatrix. There's a cross for the airmen who died. And a model of a fighter plane stands by the old runway.

Sometimes the real story of a place isn't what's left in plain sight. It's what's left in the names of the streets we walk down without looking at our feet.

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