He worked as a factory laborer, ditch-digger at construction sites, and cleaner of gutters at a dye plant in Saint Petersburg.

The racetrack was also the site of the first All-Russia Festival of Ballooning in autumn of 1910, and Ilyushin assisted in unpacking crates and setting up equipment.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ilyushin was conscripted into the Imperial Russian Army, serving with the infantry, and later (as he was literate) as a clerk in the military administration of Vologda.

[1] In March 1918, with the withdrawal of the Bolshevik government from the war, Ilyushin was demobilized and sent back to his native village.

He helped supervise the increasing nationalization of factories in the area and in October 1918 joined the Bolshevik Party.

Ilyushin led a team which dismantled it, and sent it to Moscow where it was reverse-engineered into the U-1 trainer, of which 737 examples were subsequently built.

Menzhinski Moscow plant [ru] which later grew into the Ilyushin OKB (the bureau behind all Soviet aircraft abbreviated IL-#, a military- and civil-aviation supergiant and major global brand) in 1935.