After graduating from the Engels Military Aviation School in 1939 he was sent to a fighter aviation unit in Transbaikalia. From 1940 to 1942 he worked as a flight instructor in Ulan-Ude before returning to a combat regiment. In 1945 he briefly saw combat in the Soviet-Japanese War as a navigator in the 718th Fighter Aviation Regiment, making eleven sorties in a Yak-9 during the conflict. Later that year he was sentenced to a prison in Voroshilov for carelessly handling classified documents, but he was released early in October 1948. He then got a job in 1949 as a technician at the Gromov Flight Research Institute, where he participated in the development of a mid-air refueling system before he was fired in 1950 because of his past conviction. However, he was soon allowed to return to the institute as a test parachutist in January 1951, which led to the kickstart of the test pilot career in December 1951. He went on to conduct a variety of test flights, flying various experimental aircraft and helicopters. In 1957 he became the first person the fly the , and as part of the training of cosmonauts to handle zero-gravity environments in 1960 he flew a modified Tu-104 with Amet-khan Sultan. His life was saved not once but twice by his parachute while conducting test flights, in 1962 during a Mi-6 flight and later in 1964 while flying a Ka-22. Throughout his career he conducted tests on various aircraft including the An-10, Il-28, Ka-22, Mi-3, Mi-4, Mi-6, Mi-10, MiG-15, MiG-21, Tu-14, Tu-16, and Tu-104. Tragically his life was cut short on 6 August 1967; he was killed in the line of duty when piloting a Mi-6PZh helicopter (registration number СССР-06174) over France to fight forest fires. The cause of the crash remains unclear.