History
Konstantin A. Kalinin (1889-1940) came to aviation as early as in 1916 beginning his career as a military pilot. From 1926 he became a leader of a design team and obtained his own design bureau and aviation building facilities in the Ukraine. Working mainly on the civil aircraft (totaling 16 types and modifications), he also designed a few military airplanes, mostly bombers. One of them, K-12, even got into limited series production in late 1930ies. At the same time, Kalinin took a step towards tailless delta- winged aircraft. With innumerable model tests, many powered with gunpowder rockets, his team finally reached a tailless delta wing layout with small aspect ratio (about 2), like the delta wings today. It was not yet the time to turn the knowledge into an operational aircraft, but the basics of the delta- winged aircraft conception which realized after WWII, were achieved in the works by Kalinin already in the end of the 1930's.

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