Yakovlev Yak - 14 The Yakovlev Yak - 14 ( NATO reporting name : " Mare " , ) was the largest assault glider ever to enter service with the Soviet Air Force . It was introduced in 1949 , at a time when other air forces were abandoning the glider concept . In 1950 a Yak - 14 became the first glider to fly over the North Pole . Design and development . During World War II , the Soviet Union operated only light gliders like the Gribovski G - 11 , Antonov A - 7 and Kolesnikov - Tsybin KC - 20 which were unable to transport vehicles , light tanks or artillery . Only after the war were Soviet designers ordered to develop medium gliders capable of carrying heavy or bulky loads . In 1948 the Soviet Air Forces issued a specification for a large assault glider needed by the " VDV " ( " Vozdushnodesantnyye Voyska " - airborne troops ) which was to be capable of carrying a payload of , including loads like an anti - tank or field gun with its crew and associated tow vehicle , or up to 35 troops . The Yakovlev design bureau was instructed to design an aircraft to meet this requirement , despite its relative inexperience in the design of such large aircraft . Yakovlev ' s design , the Yak - 14 was a high - wing monoplane . It had a rectangular section fuselage with a steel - tube and dural structure with a fabric covering . To aid loading and unloading of cargo , the aircraft ' s nose swung to the right with the tail section pivoting to the left . The two pilots sat side by side in an enclosed cockpit above the left side of the fuselage . They were provided with a display that used a transmitter in the towing aircraft to show the relative positions of the two aircraft when flying in cloud . The wings were made of dural and fabric and were braced to the fuselage by a single strut on each side . Large slotted trailing - edge flaps were fitted to the wings , while the aircraft was fitted with a fixed nosewheel undercarrige which could be made to " kneel " by releasing air from the pneumatic shock struts of the undercarriage , lowering the fuselage for ease of unloading or to make short landing on belly mounted skids . Testing . The first prototype made its maiden flight in June 1948 from Medvyezhe Ozero , near Omsk . Official testing resulted in a number of changes to the design , with a large dorsal fin being fitted , and spoilers being added to reduce landing runs , while the payload of the glider was increased to allow an ASU - 57 assault gun to be carried . As such the Yak - 14 passed its acceptance trials from August to September 1949 , with the glider entering mass production later that year . While some Yak - 14s were constructed at Chkalovsk , the majority were produced at Rostov - on - Don . Total production was 413 series gliders . Operational history . The Yak - 14 filled an important role in Soviet service in the 1950s , being the only way of carrying large loads by air to remote parts of the Soviet Union without having to disassemble the loads . The usual tug was the Ilyushin Il - 12 . One Yak - 14 was flown to the North Pole in 1950 , while another example of the glider ' s versatility took place in March 1954 , when four Yak - 14s made a long distance flight to an ice station on an ice floe drifting on the Arctic Ocean , with the supplies delivered including a large bulldozer . The gliders flew from Tula on March 10 , with several stops at Omsk , Krasnoyarsk and the Schmidt Cape , on Sakhalin island in the Far East , before reaching SP - 4 in early April during a heavy freeze . A few were delivered to Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s which used them under the designation NK - 14 . Soviet Air Force transport gliders were gradually withdrawn from service with the arrival of turbo - prop transports like the Antonov An - 24 and Antonov An - 12 , which entered service in the late 1950s .