Nadezhda Popova
Nadezhda Vasilyevna Popova (, ; 17 December 1921 – 8 July 2013) was a squadron commander in the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Regiment during the Second World War who achieved significant domestic publicity after completing 18 bombing sorties in one night with navigator Yekaterina Ryabova. Awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union on 23 February 1945 for completing 737 sorties, she was featured on the cover of Komsomolskaya Pravda and in many other major Soviet publications during the war. Early life. Popova was born in Shabanovka on 17 December 1921. The daughter of a railwayman, she grew up near  the Donetsk coal fields in Ukraine. As an adolescent, she loved music, song, and dance, taking part in amateur plays and musicals, and considered becoming an actress or doctor before entering aviation. "The Economist" reported that she was a "wild spirit, easily bored; she loved to tango, foxtrot, sing along to jazz. It made her feel free." When a small aircraft landed near her village, she became enamored with aviation, enrolling in a gliding school at the age of 15 without telling her parents. "Walking towards a plane, every time, she would get a knot in her stomach; every time  she took off, she was thrilled all over again." In 1937, she made both her first parachute jump and her first solo flight at the age of sixteen. Despite her parents' opposition, she pursued her new passion and obtained her flying license. She was initially rejected as a student by a pilot school, but after Polina Osipenko, the Inspector for Aviation in the Moscow Military District, recommended her, she was allowed to enroll in the Kherson flight school, graduating at the age of eighteen and becoming a flight instructor. World War II. Popova volunteered to be a military pilot, but  the government initially barred women from combat and turned her away. But in October 1941, Joseph Stalin caved in to pressure from Marina Raskova and permitted the creation of three women's aviation regiments. Popova, whose brother Leonid had been killed at the front in 1941 and whose home had been taken by invading German troops, was sent by Marina Raskova to Engels to join other women being trained to become military pilots. She then joined the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, which flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a bi-plane used as a crop duster before the war. The regiment  flew combat sorties exclusively at night; their planes, which were not equipped with guns, radios, radar, or parachutes, would catch fire easily if hit by tracer-bullets (though they were usually actually better protected against splinters then more modern variants). On 10 March 1942, during a training mission, Popova was leading a formation when two aircraft got lost in a heavy blizzard and crashed, killing their crews. These were the first casualties sustained by her unit. After training, she was sent to fight in her childhood home region of the Donetsk coal fields. The regiment was called "Nachthexen" (Night Witches ) by the Germans "because the whooshing noise their plywood and canvas airplanes made reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch’s broomstick." Popova was shot down several times in the three years she spent fighting, but was never badly wounded. On 2 August 1942, she was on a day reconnaissance mission when she was attacked by Luftwaffe fighters and forced to make an emergency landing near Cherkessk. Trying to return to her unit, she joined a motorized column, and among the wounded met her future husband, fighter pilot Semyon Kharlamov, who was reading "And Quiet Flows the Don