The first documented scheme for in-flight refuelling came from a young Russian aviator named Alexander de Seversky. His father owned a plane and taught him to fly when he was in his early teens. In 1917, when he was 23, Seversky proposed a method for extending flight: One plane could carry extra fuel and deliver it to another through a hose. After the Russian Revolution, Russia’s new Bolshevik government sent him to the United States to study aircraft design, and he stayed there when political developments made his return to Russia dangerous. He got a job as an aeronautical engineer for the US War Department and was awarded the world’s first patent for air-to-air refuelling, in which large fuel tankers would supply fuel to fighter aircraft while in flight. Seversky went on to a distinguished career in airplane design and achieved perhaps his greatest fame as the author of the influential 1942 book Victory through Air Power. He never put his refuelling plan into action, though, and other aviators later came up with ideas of their own.