Problem, How To Get A Slow Heavy Tank On To A Battlefield, Fast,

without risking a TB-3 bomber to drop one by parachute,

answer, strap a couple of wings to the tank, tow it till it gets up to speed and let it glide there! in the Second World War it must have seemed a good idea as Oleg Antonov wondered how the Russians could get a fully laden tank onto a battlefield and it sort of worked, the wings were ditched on landing, if you’re wondering how the tank’s pilot steered the thing, that was a work of simplistic genius, its wings were controlled by the movements of the tank’s own gun turret, moving it up and down, for example, would allow it to adjust pitch, moving it left or right would allow it to bank, left or right,


the first (and only) flight was actually sort of successful, the pilot at the tank’s helm was Sergei Anokin, Sergei was a test pilot by trade and had to take a crash course in tank driving prior to the test flight, as for the flight itself, the Tupolev TB-3 bomber towing the tank had its engines overheat and they nearly failed almost immediately after take-off, because of this, the TB-3 had to cut the tank free earlier than expected, even still, Sergei was able to guide the tank in and reportedly landed “very smoothly” in a nearby field, He was even able to drive the tank back to headquarters to report on the success personally, but,


there were a couple of problems, firstly with the TB-3 was struggling to pull the specaily lightened slimmed down tank for the test flight, the fact that project was eventually set on making the significantly heavier T-34 tanks fly almost doomed it to failure, secondly a good number of TB-3 planes needed to tow the contraption had been destroyed by the war, so the project was scrapped, 


that’s not to say some officials didn’t see the benefit of flying tanks raining death from the sky, it was just agreed that it was a much better idea to use the limited resource of bombers at their command for a more conventional purpose… like bombing things.