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A Soviet-era foundation, which began with 69 students of aircraft construction and engineering production enrolled by a division of Kharkhiv Polytechnic Institute in 1930, KhAI is now a key part of Ukraine’s strategically vital aerospace sector, providing around 80 per cent of its employees with a higher education.

One of 25 higher-education institutions in Ukraine’s second city, it is based on a 25-hectare campus in the forest district of Kharkhiv. It declares a mission to "develop aerospace in Ukraine and the world by training highly qualified specialists and conducting research in aviation, space, mechanical engineering, information technology and related fields”.

It has a long production history, with each of its planes registered as KhAI and numbered. Within two years KhAI-1 was in production, with advanced landing gear, while subsequent innovations have included the first aeroplane with turbojet engine and the first European high-speed craft with retractable landing gear. Many of these aeroplanes are displayed on campus in the Oleg Antonov State Aviation Museum.

KhAI currently enrols around 7,000 students and can accommodate the bulk of them in 10 halls of residence on campus. The first overseas students were enrolled in 1992, and there are now more than 1,000 from more than 40 countries – around a third of Kharkiv’s international student community.

The campus was shelled during the Russian invasion in 2022. Chinese students were able to take their classes in physics, maths, English and Ukrainian online, while one Indian student defied his own national laws to enlist in the Ukrainian army.