History has overlooked the unimaginable hardships Russian aircraft designers faced under the paranoid rule of Josef Stalin during World War ll. In spite of being arrested and made to work in special prison camps, Soviet aircraft designers independently discovered jet and rocket technology.

The innovative aircraft profiled in this programme include A.S. Moskalyov's plan for a supersonic delta-wing aircraft in the 1930s and Andrei Tupolev's long distance bomber that flew non-stop across the North Pole to California in 1937, and there are weirder Soviet planes including a flying tank prototype and a submarine-bomber that could land on water and then submerge to attack its prey. We also show rare footage of the MiG 1-270 rocket fighter and the MiG-8, a prototype that secretly tested swept-wings despite Stalin's order to concentrate on conventional aviation technology.

Using specially commissioned computer graphics, never seen archive footage and interviews with aviation experts, we bring back to life the Secret Russian Planes of the Second World War.