Initially Konstantin Konstantinovich opted for another career – a son of a sailor, he entered the Marine Cadet Corps.

But the sky had won over the sea, and he finished a flight school and took up gliding.

Aviation was in its youth at the time. Aviators piloting unreliable designs faced many enemies: all kinds of flutters, shimmy and the scariest event – spiraling down. This is when the plane falls while rotating around all three axes. By 1916, aviators had mastered many figures of aerial acrobatics. Pyotr Nesterov even performed his famous loop. But spiraling was feared – it was unclear how to right the plane to leave it. And Konstantin Artseulov was the first to dare: he deliberately entered his plane into spiraling and recovered from it on his own! Now it is just a figure of aerial acrobatics. Mastering it is thought to expand the capabilities for maneuvering the aircraft and to reduce the number of casualties in aviation.

Later Artseulov taught at a pilot school and one of his students was the legendary Valery Chkalov. But then his career spiraled down like a doomed airplane: he was reported to the secret police and suffered repression. He never returned to aviation. A grandson of the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, he shared his talent, and Soviet boys were especially familiar with his works: Artseulov did artwork for the Engineering for Youth and the Young Technician magazines.