Amet-khan Sultan (Crimean Tatar: Amet-Han Sultan, Амет-Хан Султан, احمدخان سلطان; Ukrainian/Russian: Амет-Хан Султан; 20 October 1920 – 1 February 1971) was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace in the Soviet Air Force with 30 personal and 19 shared kills who was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Despite having been able to avoid deportation to Uzbekistan when the entire Crimean Tatar nation was repressed in 1944 due to his father's Lak background, he refused to change his passport nationality listing to Lak or identify as one throughout his entire life despite pressure from government organs. After the end of the war, he worked as a test pilot at the Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky and mastered piloting 96 different aircraft types before he was killed in a crash while testing a new engine on a modified Tupolev Tu-16 bomber. He remains memorialized throughout Ukraine and Russia, with streets, schools, and airports named after him as well as a museum dedicated to his memory.
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Amet-khan Sultan in the context of Simferopol International Airport
Simferopol International Airport is an airport located in Simferopol, Crimea. Since the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014, the airport is only used for flights to and from Russian airports due to limited international recognition of the annexation. As of 24 February 2022, all flights are suspended due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On 14 May 2015, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted to rename it Amet-khan Sultan International Airport in memory of Amet-khan Sultan, despite that Russia occupied Crimea and controlled the airport since 2014. Another airport named after Amet-khan Sultan is Uytash Airport located in Makhachkala, Dagestan, Russia. However, in 2018, citizens voted for the airport to be named after the painter Ivan Aivazovsky after Amet-khan's name was not allowed in the list of final three options to vote for despite being the most popular in the preliminary round of voting.
Amet-khan Sultan in the context of Uytash Airport
Makhachkala Uytash Airport (Russian: Аэропорт Махачкала Уйташ) (IATA: MCX, ICAO: URML) is a civil airport located near Makhachkala and just south of the city of Kaspiysk which is on the west side of the Caspian Sea. It is named after Amet-khan Sultan, World War II fighter pilot, twice Hero of the Soviet Union. The naming was found controversial by the Crimean Tatars, with whom Amet-khan openly affiliated, as an attempt to detatarize his origins.
South East Airlines (formerly Dagestan Airlines) had its head office on the property of the airport.