Nelson Georgievich Stepanyan (Armenian: Նելսոն Գևորգի Ստեփանյան, Russian: Нельсон Георгиевич Степанян; 28 March [O.S.

[2] Stepanyan was teaching at another military flight academy when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

[2] As of November 1942, Stepanyan was reported to have destroyed 78 German trucks, 67 tanks, 63 anti-aircraft guns, nineteen mortars, 36 railroad cars, twenty merchantmen and warships (including a destroyer), thirteen fuel tankers, twelve armored cars, seven long-range guns, five ammunition dumps, and five bridges.

In May 1944, after the liberation of Crimea, the 47th Regiment returned to the Baltic Sea, where they were involved in the battles of the Gulf of Finland.

On his final sortie against Liepāja in western Latvia on 14 December 1944, his squadron was attacked by German fighters.

His fellow pilots sent the following letter to his parents after his death: [Stepanyan was a] simple and modest man, close and beloved by all; he was a father and teacher to all of us, a friend and a commander....We all wept when Nelson Gevorgovich failed to return on that fateful day.

Soviet sources assert that Stepanyan undertook no less than 239 combat sorties, sunk 53 ships thirteen of which he did alone, destroyed 80 tanks, 600 armored vehicles, and 27 aircraft.

The statue in Liepāja was going to be destroyed by the order of the new independent Latvian authorities, but was rescued by the Russian Navy.

On 8 May 2011, the eve of the 66th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War, Stepanyan was included on a monument in Ulyanovsk dedicated to pilots who were Heroes of the Soviet Union.