Some unusual cargo. Here's What You Need to Remember: These special TB-3s were not carrying any bombs at all. Instead, the I-16 Type 24 fighters braced under the bomber’s wings each carried two 250-kilogram bombs. Early in the morning of August 10, 1941, three boxy Soviet TB-3 bombers took off from the airbase at Yevpatoria in the Crimean Peninsula, bearing a most unusual cargo under their gargantuan wings: two manned, stubby-nosed I-16 fighter planes, their Shvetsov radial engines chortling and propellers spinning to help propel the sluggish four-engine TB-3s they were attached to. One of the aircraft-carrying motherships had to abort mission due to technical problems. The six remaining aircraft assumed an eastward course across the Black Sea towards the Romanian city of Constanta roughly 250 miles away, cruising at roughly 155 miles per hour.