TsKB-55 was a two-seat aircraft with an armoured shell weighing 700 kg (1,500 lb), protecting crew, engine, radiators, and the fuel tank. The Il-2 was designed by Sergey Ilyushin and his team at the Central Design Bureau in 1938. However, Soviet engines at the time lacked the power needed to provide the heavy aircraft with good performance.

The idea for a Soviet armored ground-attack aircraft dates to the early 1930s, when Dmitry Pavlovich Grigorovich designed TSh-1 and TSh-2 armored biplanes. When factories fell behind on deliveries, Joseph Stalin told the factory managers that the Il-2s were 'as essential to the Red Army as air and bread.' The Il-2 aircraft played a crucial role on the Eastern Front. Its postwar NATO reporting name was ' Bark'.

To the soldiers on the ground, it was the 'Hunchback', the 'Flying Tank' or the 'Flying Infantryman'. To Il-2 pilots, the aircraft was simply the diminutive 'Ilyusha'. The word also appears in Western sources as Stormovik and Sturmovik, neither of which give correct pronunciation in English.ĭuring the war, 36,183 units of the Il-2 were produced, and in combination with its successor, the Ilyushin Il-10, a total of 42,330 were built, making it the single most produced military aircraft design in aviation history, as well as one of the most produced piloted aircraft in history along with the American postwar civilian Cessna 172 and the Soviet Union's own then-contemporary Polikarpov Po-2 Kukuruznik multipurpose biplane. The Il-2 was never given an official name and 'shturmovik' is the generic Russian word meaning ground attack aircraft. The Ilyushin Il-2 ( Cyrillic: Илью́шин Ил-2) Shturmovik ( Cyrillic: Штурмови́к, Shturmovík) is a ground-attack aircraft produced by the Soviet Union in large numbers during the Second World War.

Il 2 sturmovik 1946 level stabilizer