Needing to support himself he returned to Rokitnoe, where he found work as a mechanic at the Siniavskyi sugar factory.

His arrival coincided with an upsurge in the Institute's interest in aviation, marked by the opening of the Aircraft Construction Faculty - the starting point for many Soviet aircraft designers (including Alexander Mikulin, Dmitry Pavlovich Grigorovich, Konstantin Kalinin, Sergei Korolev and Alexei Gratsianskyi).

In 1929 he (together with M. Zhemchuzhin) designed and built the glider "Grif", which broke two national records (rising by more than 1500m and flying 35 miles).

The main business of the plant was, as the name implies, repairing aircraft, for both the military and civilian customers.

Despite being an outstanding design, poor workmanship in construction (and, it is rumoured, sabotage) resulted in the prototype crashing, killing its test pilot Valery Chkalov.

In July 1941, Tomashevich was released and in August evacuated to CDB-29 in Omsk, Siberia where he was put in charge of his own design bureau.

There he designed the Tomashevich Pegas, a simple twin-engined ground-attack aeroplane – of which four (some sources state five) prototypes were built.

Later that year work started on project 10Kh (sometimes translated as "10X") - an unmanned flying bomb, not unlike the German V-1 - although the 10Kh was designed to be air-launched only.

The Soviet Union had experimented with technologies to try and boost the range of their anti-aircraft artillery, in an attempt to counter the threat posed by high-altitude bombers such as the Boeing B-29 Superfortress.

Now a respected academic, Tomashevich gave lectures and wrote books, notably "Economic construction of Aircraft" (1960) and "Fundamentals of the design of unmanned aerial vehicles."

Dmitri Lyudvigovich Tomashevich, having survived both World Wars, the Russian Revolutions and the regimes of Nicholas II of Russia, Stalin and Beria, died in a car accident on 7 August 1974.