Soviet Test Pilot Kokkinaki; Set 14 World Flight Records

Vladimir Kokkinaki, one of the Soviet Unions’s top veteran test pilots who set 14 world records for altitude and speed, yet was known best to Americans for a flight he never completed, has died at age 80, the official press agency Tass said.

Kokkinaki, who test flew several passenger airliners for top Soviet aircraft designer Sergei Ilyushin, died Monday, Tass said.

On April 29, 1939, Kokkinaki and his navigator, Mikhail Gordienko, took off from Moscow in a twin-engine, red monoplane named “Moskva,” Russian for Moscow. It was to have been a 4,600-mile, nonstop flight from Moscow to New York, commemorating the World’s Fair. But 23 hours and 40 minutes later Gordienko crash-landed the plane on a lonely island near the northeastern tip of New Brunswick, Canada, after Kokkinaki fainted. The men had been flying at 27,000 feet to obtain favorable weather conditions.

Although the flight failed, both fliers were hailed at the New York World’s Fair as heroes and on their return to Moscow were awarded the Order of Lenin.

Kokkinaki also once held the world’s altitude record--47,806 feet in an open cockpit in 1935.