The Pilot

George Baevsky joined the military in May 1940 after graduating from the Dzerzhinsky Aeroclub flight school in 1939. In November 1940 Baevsky was promoted to the rank of junior lieutenant and assigned as a flight instructor to the Serpukhov flight school. In 1941 he was transferred to the Chkalov Central Aeroclub in Northwest Moscow where he worked until he was sent to the front in April 1943 in the 5th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment of the 1st Guards Mixed Aviation Corps of the 17th Air Army. His first experience of aerial combat was with a Bf 109 on 27 April 1943. During the war he participated in aerial combat in the Battles for Berlin, Kursk, Dnieper, and Warsaw; by December 1943 he had completed 144 combat sorties and was nominated for the title Hero of the Soviet Union which he received on 4 February 1944. By the end of the war he had completed 252 sorties in 52 different aerial battles, for which he became flying ace for having personally shot down 19 enemy aircraft in total while flying a Lavochkin La-5.

After the war Baevsky attended the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy and became a test pilot for the air force after graduating, starting his job at the Chkalov Air Force Test Center in 1951 where he worked until entering the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia which he graduated in 1962. In his career as a test pilot he became a skilled pilot of 77 different aircraft types and was heavily involved in the testing of the MiG-25 in Egypt. By the time he retired from the military in 1985 he had risen to the rank of Major-General and had become the Deputy Chief of the Zhukovsky Academy where he had previously been a student