Moscow

There can be no doubt that interest in Friedmann's personality will increase over the years, and then the many “desert areas” in his biography will disappear, giving place to cultivated “plots” densely populated with events. One such remaining “desert area” is the time that Friedmann spent in Moscow before leaving for Perm. It is known that the Central Aeronavigational Station in April 1917 moved from Kiev to Moscow – together with the personnel and the various services (workshop, instrument store, etc.), and the laboratory. Friedmann was appointed a member of the commission for the construction of an aviation instrument plant. By this time in Moscow several buildings had been prepared for the future plant on the site of former Georgian bath houses. The plant was called “Aviapribor” (aviation instruments); it had started earlier, in 1915, as a workshop for repairing aeronavigational instruments. Friedmann dealt with this very workshop, and he recommended N. N. Andreyev, an acquaintance of his, for a job there. Andreyev started to work there and got in touch with Nikolai Zhukovsky. Later he reminisced that in his first talk with Zhukovsky “Friedmann's name was a key to his heart and he immediately got warmer,” and gave an instruction to render Andreyev all possible assistance. Andreyev was interested in wind tunnels necessary for solving the important problem of graduating instruments for continuous automatic recording of wind speed and direction.

In the summer of 1917, Friedmann was appointed head of one of the departments in the plant. The department heads formed a council which operated under the plant's management and collaborated with it in framing the plant's policy, and made technological and organizational decisions.