By Sam Oleson
If you happened to be walking among the rows of L-birds, trainers, and assorted Eastern Bloc aircraft in the Warbirds area at AirVenture 2026 the past few days, there was likely one airplane that elicited a “What is THAT?” reaction from even the more knowledgeable military aviation buffs: an ultrarare Soviet Yak-12M.
Introduced shortly after World War II, the Yak-12 was designed by the Yakovlev Design Bureau in response to a 1944 Soviet air force requirement for a new forward observation aircraft to operate off rough, unimproved airstrips in remote areas with “minimum maintenance.” The Yak-12M that arrived in Oshkosh on Wednesday is owned and operated by the nonprofit organization Antique and Classic Aircraft International in Long Island, New York, and is believed to be the only flying example in the U.S. Built in 1955, the airplane originally served in Poland and is powered by an Ivchenko AI-14R, a 260-hp, nine-cylinder radial engine, and is fitted in an air ambulance configuration.
“It’s the second-to-last model that they made in Russia,” said Craig Sampson, who led the restoration on the airplane for Antique and Classic Aircraft International. “It was designed in the middle of World War II as a replacement for the Po-2 biplane. The aircraft is mainly for observation operations, Russian front lines, similar to the Birddog. So troop evacuation, and aerial spotting of artillery, and things like that. So it used to be the job of the Po-2, and the Yak-12 was designed then to take over. This one is a 1955 variant and served in Russia and Poland.”
Craig, EAA 640840, said not much is known about the airplane’s history prior to it arriving in the U.S., with it eventually making its way to Long Island in 2015 after it changed hands a couple times.
“This particular plane, we don’t know its original history,” he said. “It did spend time in Poland, towing gliders at the end of its life. It was then somehow bought by somebody to import it to the United States. It was impounded in the Port of Houston by customs. For what reason? We don’t know. It ended up on the chopping block and at a customs auction. A gentleman here in the States decided it’d be a great idea [to purchase it]. He bought it at auction, probably for a pretty cheap price, and decided he wanted to restore it to flying condition. He saw how big the project was and gave up on it. … We have a small not-for-profit organization we set up to take the airplane as a donation. So we did, it was donated to us, and we decided we’d give it a shot to restore it to flying condition. That was 11 years ago.”
Craig and his team put together a group of volunteers and set to work restoring the airplane, though it certainly was not a straightforward process when it came to documentation.
“It was just a steel tube frame and a container with boxed parts,” he said. “Half of it couldn’t be recognized. And no manuals. So we sourced the manuals. We managed to find the original Russian manuals written in Russian Cyrillic. So we had to use Google Translate and a couple of Russian volunteers that could speak it. So it was a bit of a chore, but we got it done. We were very lucky that most of the parts came with the project. We just rummaged through all the boxes, and most of them were there. So as far as the airframe parts were concerned, most of it was there.”
The airplane’s first postrestoration flight took place in November 2025, with Craig performing the test-flying regimen.
“First flew in November of last year, right before winter set in. So we got our first couple of flights in, then put it away in a hangar to wait out the whole New York winter, and then started flying it again in March,” Craig said. “So it’s been flying now since March, building time on it. I did all the test flying. It’s the only one flying in the country. There were no pilots that had any experience, so the insurance company said, ‘Well, you’re it.’ And they allowed me to fly it and learn how. I flew a Yak, the only one in England, for about an hour a couple of years ago. And that was my only experience. But I do have a lot of experience in tailwheel aircraft and a lot of small aircraft flying.”
With a cruise speed of around 100 mph, the Yak-12 is definitely a low-and-slow flyer. Between the early-week wildfire smoke and some poor weather on the way to Oshkosh, Craig and a small team of Antique and Classic Aircraft International volunteers arrived a bit later than expected but were happy to showcase this rare Russian treasure at AirVenture.
“It’s always a big adventure to come to EAA, no matter what,” he said. “If you can bring something different, it’s exciting to do that, and let the general public get to see that it’s here. And we need all the support we can get to keep flying. All the interest that we can generate in it, it just helps us out as a not-for-profit organization.”
To learn more or donate to Antique and Classic Aircraft International, visit AntiqueAircraft.org. Be on the lookout for a full-length feature story on the Yak-12M in a future EAA publication.