This may be my favorite aircraft documentary series besides the Secret (blank) Aircraft of WWII episodes of Modern Marvels. The first thing to love is the narrator, whose thick Russian accent and frequent mispronunciation of English words and improper grammar are an absolute delight. It's charming, relaxing, and even unintentionally funny to listen to. This series is worth checking out just for this guy's accent alone. In terms of content, what sets this documentary apart from many aviation documentaries is how comprehensive it is. Unlike many series such as Great Planes or Wings of The Red Star which cover mostly military aircraft and maybe a couple popular civilian models, Wings of Russia covers military aircraft of all types, passenger aircraft, emergency vehicles, helicopters, training aircraft, and even ground effect vehicles (something I didn't know existed until watching this series). Also to be commended is the unbiased attitude/approach. Some western-produced aircraft shows, most notably Dogfights, are quite one-sided and annoyingly patriotic. Wings of Russia does not feel like propaganda at all. They have no problem objectively stating the pros and cons of a plane whether its eastern or western. I highly recommend this series to anyone even remotely interested in aviation. Such a wide variety of topics are covered, there's sure to be something in here for everyone. Even if you're not, the amusing narration will suck you in anyway!
2 Reviews
A solid overview of soviet (and later russian) air vehicles
nickenchuggets3 May 2021
This is one of the most in depth and comprehensive series on planes (and helicopters) that I have ever watched. My only real complaint about it is the narrator, since the text to speech sounding voice gets monotonous fairly quickly, but the information you're receiving makes you forget about it. What differentiates this from most other series that make aviation their focal point is how consistently the information is presented to the viewer. Because the series is from russia, access to soviet archival material and secret documents is probably unrestricted, and this allows them to give the viewer the ins and outs on how a plane is made, the choice of engine, how frustrating (or not) the developmental process was, whether or not the plane was exported to other nations, what weapons were chosen for it, and more. These backstories on how the aircraft featured were developed is without a doubt one of the most engaging parts of this program. The show definitely does not slack on the sheer number of different aircraft that are presented. Even as someone that always enjoyed reading about planes, some episodes tell me things I never even knew, like how the ussr was so far behind in terms aircraft quality on the eve of the second world war compared with germany. In the 1930s, Britain had stolen the lead by inventing the first modern jet engine, credited to Frank Whittle, and the germans had the turbojet powered heinkel 178. The soviet union by this point only had thousands of mostly obsolete aircraft that were poorly armed and their pilots were not as well trained as german ones. Remember, one reason why many german pilots in ww2 had such a ridiculous amount of kills (sometimes as much as 300) is because many had been flying as early as the spanish civil war. The series does diligent work and meticulously goes through each era of soviet aircraft design, from ww1 to the modern day. It hasn't been easy, and many test pilots were killed in the various machines. Still, in the modern world the russian air force is one of the most formidable on earth, and this series goes over what exactly they had to do in order to get to that point.
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