Dear friends,
As Jason Nicholas Moore rightly says, the Ilyushin Il-2 is regarded as the Russian equivalent of the Spitfire.
But for a number of reasons, to describe the differences between the more than 36000 planes produced, in the West have been used several invented subtypes, that have also been used in Russian literature, as in the official documents all the serial planes were called just Il-2.
Now for the first time we have a description of the several differences between all the Il-2 series, starting from 1941 and ending in 1945!
The author of this study is Professor Ivan Rodionov, who published a first article with scale drawings from factory material, in the May edition of Modelist Konstructor for the year 1982, from which most if not all the subsequent scale drawings are derived.
Research discovers new material, so after little more than forty years, he published a second article in January 2023 in M-Hobby with scale drawings by Trufanov.
Now he has prepared the most detailed description that I have ever seen of all the visible differences in the different series produced by the different factories.
Thanks to Massimo courtesy, you can find the first part, dedicated to the first single seaters produced by Zavod 18 in 1941, with the serial number 18 6 XX XX.
It is 126 pages long, with just about 10% of text, and 90% of images.
You can find it in English at the index address
https://massimotessitori.altervista.org/sovietwarplanes/pages/index.html And the good news are that other parts will follow, and I hope that in about one week time, you will be able to enjoy the description of the 18 7 XX XX series.
Then others will follow describing the other factories and the two seaters.
Obviously many things still remain to be clarified, and so corrections and additions are welcome, but I would say that with the information we have now everybody can produce an Il-2 model faithful to the original.
Regards
Daniele
