Read the text carefully. What was the feat of Nikoli Gastello?

This happened on 26 June 1941 of the year, on the fifth day of the war, when the plane of Captain Nikolai Gastello was shot down during the bombardment of an enemy tank column. The squadron commander did not come out of the battle and continued to fight the Nazis to the end. The pilot with his firm hand sent a bomber in flames into the thick of the enemy’s tanks and gas tankers. There, in the raging fire of enemy vehicles, he completed his last flight with the commander and his combat crew \(lieutenants Gregory Skorobogaty, Anatoly Burdenyuk and sergeant Alex Kalinin\).

The name of the hero gained fame. Central newspapers wrote about the feat and talked on the radio. Throwing the bomber set on fire on a ground target, first accomplished by regiment commissar M. Yuyukin as early as 1939, and the feat of captain Gastello showed Soviet pilots the last means of struggle that they could not take away from them - neither the damage of the aircraft, nor the exhausted supply of shells, nor the heavy wound.

After that, several crews repeated this great feat. Although, among some military historians, there has been a statement that the ground ram was caused by the accidental fall of lost control aircraft. But the facts tell a different story. The testimonies of our pilots who heard the last words of the heroes in the headphones of the headsets through the crash of the battle: “For the Motherland, go to the ram!” And those who saw them fiery peak, finally, the very circumstances of the ramming convincingly prove that the wounded machines were deliberately sent to the pilots with a firm hand.