Timur Avtandilovich Apakidze (, , also transliterated as Temur Apakidze; 4 March 1954 – 17 July 2001) was a Russian major general of Georgian ethnicity, fighter pilot, flight specialist and founder of the modern Russian Naval Aviation and Hero of the Russian Federation. Early life and education Timur Apakidze was born in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR to a Russian mother and a Georgian father from noble Georgian house of Apakidze. His mother moved with him to Leningrad when he was one year old. There he grew up and attended school. After graduating from 8th grade Apakidze enrolled in the Leningrad Nakhimov Naval School. In 1971, on the eve of graduation, the chief commander of the academy telegraphed Admiral Sergey Gorshkov about Apakidze's exceptional skills and requested his return to the fleet as soon as he had finished flight school. The Admiral agreed and from 1971 Apakidze began serving in the Soviet military as a naval aviator. The same year he became a cadet of the Yeysk Higher Military Aviation School. Military service In 1975, after his EVVAU graduation in Yeysk, Timur Apakidze was assigned, with the rank of lieutenant, to the 846th Separate Guards Naval Attack Aviation Regiment "VP Chkalov" of the Baltic Fleet. By 1983, having already been promoted to major, he acted as deputy commander for the same regiment's flight training. During that appointment he introduced hand-to-hand combat training for pilots, being convinced that warriors without a weapon should know how to defend themselves if the situation demanded it. In 1986 after graduating from the Grechkov Naval Academy he was sent to the city of Nikolayev and appointed commander of the 100th Fighter Regiment. He studied shipborne aviation techniques at the "Center of Naval Aviation". From the late 1980s to the early 1990s he was considered the best Soviet, then Russian fighter pilot, being the first one who would land a Su-27K (Su-33) on deck of the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov on September 26, 1991. On the same day he performed another three landings and afterwards successfully tested the same maneuver at night and under difficult weather conditions, practically becoming the founder of modern Russian naval aviation. Prior to that Apakidze had lost one of the first aircraft of the series, code-named "T-10K-8", due to control malfunctions. He survived the incident by ejecting but repeatedly stated that he could not forgive himself for not having saved the fighter. At