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.

Amet-Khan Sultan was born on 20 October 1920 to a Crimean Tatar mother and a Lak father in Alupka, Crimea, then part of the short-lived state of South Russia (now Ukraine) during the Russian Civil War.

[5] When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Amet-khan was a pilot in the 4th Fighter Aviation Regiment and immediately deployed to the front lines to carry out defensive sorties flying the obsolete Polikarpov I-153 over Rostov-on-Don.

Amet-khan stayed on that farm for a night to recover and was visited by the regiment commissar, who woke him up and congratulated him on his successful attack.

[13][14] In the summer of 1942, Amet-khan scored nine more aerial victories, most of them while flying in groups over Voronezh in a Hawker Hurricane before he was reassigned in August to Stalingrad, where he piloted a Yak-7B and was praised by his commanders for being one of the first in the regiment to engage an enemy fighter at night.

In the Battle of Stalingrad he quickly increased his tally and was reassigned in October to the prestigious 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, which had been reorganized to be composed entirely of flying aces to counter German air offensives in the area.

[16] After retraining to fly a Bell P-39 Airacobra in 1943 he fought over Rostov-on-Don and saw heavy combat over the Kuban area as part of the campaign to retake control of Taganrog, Melitopol, and the Crimean Peninsula.

Although not recorded in official Soviet documents, British historians Thomas Polak and Christopher Shores attributed a second aerial ramming of a Ju 88 to Amet-khan,[18] taking place over the Battle of Stalingrad in winter of 1943.

The NKVD officer then began questioning him about his ethnic background, decided that Amet-khan was technically Dagestani, and explained that there was an order to deport the entire Crimean Tatar people and that his brother Imran was wanted for collaborating with the Germans.

[22] After witnessing the violent deportation, Amet-khan returned to his regiment and continued to distinguish himself in battle, but suffered from severe depression.

However, due to his minimal secondary education, he found the courses difficult and eventually requested permission to drop out of the school and was allowed to leave in 1946.

[26] From 1951 to 1953, he along with Sergey Anokhin, Fyodor Burtsev, and Vasily Pavlov flew manned tests of the KS-1 Komet, an anti-ship air-to-surface missile.

[36][38] His other work included testing the NM-1, which he made the first flight in on 7 April 1959, but later tests of the aircraft eventually went to Rady Zakharov after Amet-khan was briefly hospitalized and temporarily grounded from flying due to health complications of long flight work, although he was eventually barred from flying high-speed aircraft altogether.

[39][24] His funeral was attended by a variety of famous people from the Soviet Union, ranging from members of the Crimean Tatar civil rights movement, veterans of the war, generals, and test pilots, including Vladimir Ilyushin, Aleksey Ryazanov, and Abdraim Reshidov.

[44] In the summer of 1944 while in Moscow training to fly the new La-7 fighter, he met a woman by the name of Faina Maksimovna Danilchenko, and they later married in 1952.

[2] Amet-khan was one of the first people in the Soviet Union to publicly request the rehabilitation and right of return for the Crimean Tatars.

With several other members of the Communist Party that had lived in Crimea, he signed a petition to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,[46] but the request was rejected even though Khrushchev had condemned the deportations and granted the full right of return to other deported nations including the Chechens[47] and Karachays[48] in the 1950s.

Statues in his likeness are present throughout Ukraine and Russia in towns including Alupka, Makhachkala, and the small village of Tsovkra in Dagestan.

The city square of Simferopol bears his name in addition to streets in Alupka, Sudak, Volgograd, Zhukovsky, Kaspiysk, Sakah, and Makhachkala.