Our photo exhibition On Air Flying dedicated to aeronautics of the early twentieth century and during the First World War is currently on show in the city of Gusev in Russia's westernmost Kaliningrdad Region.
Part of our project In the Sky of Tsarskoe Selo: Aeronautics at the Imperial Residence and earlier on display in our WWI Museum, the exhibition mostly showcases photographic materials of Evgeny Karamyshev (1888–1938), a Russian and Soviet military engineer and balloonist. His descendants graciously donated the previously unpublished photographs to Tsarskoe Selo.
The photographs from the twentieth-century Russian Empire show airships, constructions of hangars and preparations for balloon flights. The exhibition features rare shots of transportable gasholders en route, tethered balloons and airship maintenance. Some of the pictures reveal panoramas of St Petersburg, Gatchina, Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo through the eyes of an aeronaut sitting in a balloon gondola.
Also noteworthy are early twentieth-century video newsreels from the Russian State Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk, which were specially selected and digitised for the exhibition. Visitors can also see digital copies of photographs from the collections of the DOSAAF of Russia's Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics, the Vadim Zadorozhny Museum of Technology, the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Foundation, and the Dolgoprudny Encyclopedia multimedia project.
The exhibition was set out on the ground floor of the city's Church of All Saints in Memory of Soldiers Fallen in WWI on the days of a local historical festival commemorating WWI's 110th anniversary. A highlight of the festival was a series of lectures delivered by military historians including Sergei Man'kov, a specialist and senior research fellow from our museum.