Aircraft, Propeller, Ilyushin Il-2 Sturmovik

History: The Ilyushin Il-2 (Cyrillic: Илью́шин Ил-2) Shturmovik (Cyrillic: Штурмови́к, Shturmovík) was a ground-attack aircraft produced by the Soviet Union in large numbers during the Second World War. With 36,183 units of the Il-2 produced during the war, and in combination with its successor, the Ilyushin Il-10, a total of 42,330 were built, making it the single most produced military aircraft design in aviation history, as well as one of the most produced piloted aircraft in history along with the American postwar civilian Cessna 172 and the Soviet Union's own then-contemporary Polikarpov Po-2 Kukuruznik multipurpose biplane.

To Il-2 pilots, the aircraft was simply the diminutive "Ilyusha". To the soldiers on the ground, it was the "Hunchback", the "Flying Tank" or the "Flying Infantryman". Its postwar NATO reporting name was "Bark". The Il-2 aircraft played a crucial role on the Eastern Front. When a factory fell behind on its deliveries, Joseph Stalin told the factory manager that they were "as essential to the Red Army as air and bread."

Railroad/Company: The public joint stock company Ilyushin Aviation Complex,[1] operating as "Ilyushin" (Russian: Илью́шин) or as "Ilyushin Design Bureau", is a former Soviet and now a Russian aircraft manufacturer and design bureau, founded in 1933 by Sergey Vladimirovich Ilyushin. Soviet/Russian nomenclature identifies aircraft from Ilyushin with the prefix "Il-" (Russian: Ил-). Ilyushin has its head office in Aeroport District, Northern Administrative Okrug, Moscow.