Who made Gagarin's death confidential

Why one of the most famous aviation crashes of the 21st Century still remains a mystery [photo+video]

Источник:kp.ru

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Тhe world's first astronaut, Yury Gagarin, died on March 27, 1968. KP examines why one of the most famous aviation crashes of the 21st Century still remains a mystery.

The world's first astronaut Yury Gagarin was killed in one of the most mysterious aviation disasters after World War II. The crash is legendary. Not only was Gagarin making an ordinary training run on board a reliable MiG-15UTI, but he was also accompanied by an experienced pilot, Soviet Hero Vladimir Seregin. Seregin was an instructor tasked with training Gagarin. He had accompanied him on numerous test flights on that very aircraft.

On that fateful March day, the pilots did not execute any complicated maneuvers. The weather was not ideal, but passable. At 10:30, Gagarin calmly informed the flight director that they had completed their assignment. Sixty-eight seconds later an explosion gave way in the Kirzhach forests.

"I hoped Gagarin had time to catapult"

General Nikolay Petrovich Kamanin, assistant to the commanding officer of the Military Air Force, wrote in his diary that he hoped Gagarin had time to catapult from his aircraft. In the 1960s, Kamanin was responsible for training Soviet astronauts.

"We received the following message: 'Gagarin and Seregin took off on their MiG-15UTI at 10:19. Connection was lost 30 minutes later. Fuel will run out soon.' I hoped that an ace pilot like Seregin would be able to find his way out of any situation, and the complications would end in an emergency landing, or at worst, the pilots catapulting from the aircraft.

"They met me at the command post. The report was short. 'Two Il-14 aircrafts and four Mi-4 helicopters are in the air, searching Kirzhach, Pokrov and the outlying areas of eastern Moscow.' The search continued for a long while with no results. But at 14:50, the commanding officer of one of the helicopters reported: 'I've found pieces of the aircraft three kilometers from Novoselovo village.'

"I quickly took a helicopter to the crash site. I had a great deal of experience searching for fragments of aircrafts from the sky. And my eyesight had not let me down once. This time, though, I only saw traces of the accident on our third turn. Soon, we landed by the edge of the forest, 800 meters from where the aircraft had crashed. The snow was over one meter deep. We stepped forward slowly – up to our waists in snow. An hour went by before we reached the crash site.

"It was soon clear that one member of the crew had died. Doctors said it was most likely Seregin. Initially we found no signs that Gagarin had died, but our hope soon died.

"At 16:32, we found the pilot's plane-table [a devise used for surveillance purposes] in the cockpit. We had reason to believe that it belonged to Gagarin – although we were not completely sure. We still hoped that he was alive – the plane-table could have remained in the cockpit even after he catapulted.

"The emergency commission met at the command post at the aerodrome until 03:00 in the morning. They decided to continue searching by plane and with ski groups and that helicopters would join them at dawn. We still had a glimmer of hope that Gagarin may have catapulted.

"Nothing of any significance had been found by 07:00 in the morning. But they had determined that the plane-table did in fact belong to Gagarin (it had been filled out in his handwriting with red ink). Around 08:00 in the morning, I noticed a stray piece of material. It turned out to be a piece of Gagarin's clothing. I found a breakfast meal ticket made out to Gagarin in the breast pocket. There were no further doubts. Gagarin was dead.

"Then we found Gagarin's wallet with his personal identification, driver's license, 74 rubles and a photo of Sergey Pavlovich Korolev on the front."

Twenty years later

The investigation would have been far less detailed had Gagarin not been on board. Most likely, no one would have known anything about the strange catastrophe – except for the pilots at Chkalov Aerodrome.

Hundreds of specialists had been called in to investigate the crash. But no single conclusion was drawn, and no attempt was made to explain why Gagarin had died.

All materials concerning the case were archived and marked "Top Secret."

The authorities were silent about the reasons behind Gagarin's death for nearly 20 years. But in 1989, participants in the investigation, including astronauts Gherman Titov and Aleksey Leonov, test pilot Sergey Mikoyan and Doctor of Technical Sciences and Air Force Lieutenant-General Sergey Belozerkovskit, finally decided to publish their own theories about what happened to Gargin. They voiced them in an open letter to the government that they hoped would open the door for further research into Gagarin's death.

Below are segments from the open letter:

"We needed to solve the following questions to accurately determine the reasons behind Gagarin's death: (1) The initial flight stats are known (from the moment of the last radio exchange), including the condition of the crew and their technology on board, the approximate altitude, course alteration, most probable flight regime; (2) The final stats (before the crash), including the condition of the glider, engine, hardware; the condition of the plane and rudders; the flight's parameters, engine's working regime; condition and position of the crew. (3) The time that the aircraft passed from the initial to the final phase (one minute). We need to determine the most likely picture of how the flight unfolded and the pilots' actions."

And further:

"It turns out that the aircraft could not have dropped 4,000 meters in altitude in the course of roughly one minute before collision [...] if the aerodynamic qualities of the aircraft had not been significantly worsened. The conclusion was reached that the aircraft entered into a corkscrew. The possible reasons are that it entered the vortical stream (of a neighboring aircraft), swerving from an actual or perceived obstacle, or the effects of wind. One objective reason that the commission did not issue a uniform conclusion was the differing opinions about why the aircraft entered into the corkscrew."

The authors of the letter address the likelihood of the pilots making an error. They are of the belief that the pilots could not have made a fatal mistake leading to the crash.

As a pilot, Seregin was considered "very reliable, decisive, highly qualified and of the utmost discipline in character."

Gagarin prepared for the flights "thoroughly, without deviating from the norms or rules." The instructors who worked with them on previous flights gave him a perfect score.

Former commanding officer of the Fighter Plane Squadron Colonel Ustenko, who had flown with Gagarin on his last successful flight, said: "Gagarin felt confident in the cockpit. He was not fidgety. He knew the locations of the valves and tumblers blindfolded. He did not make sharp movements when piloting an aircraft. He reacted to observations in a timely manner, and you never had to repeat the same thing twice. He wanted to fly – not to just talk about flying – and was serious about flight training."

Why was the letter only published in 1989? Most likely, this was no accident. The Soviet political and bureaucratic system was still strong. But myths about Gagarin's death were being published everywhere – sometimes crazy, provocative or insulting theories.

Some said that the control stick in Seregin's cockpit had been unscrewed. Others said that the pilots were purposefully given an old airplane. Some even said that Brezhnev ordered Gagarin's death because he envied his popularity. Worse still, some claim Gagarin was abducted by aliens.

How could the inquisitive parties get the current government to address such questions? The only solution would be to request the government to publicly announce the reasons for Gagarin's death. But this would mean having to open secret archives. It was unheard of to demand confidential files from the Political Bureau, so the next best bet was to publish an open letter about the incident. And they did.

But no answer was provided by the higher echelons.

Forty years later

Another 16 years of silence passed before there was a second attempt to learn the official conclusion about Gagarin's death. In 2005, managers and journalists appealed to President Putin to conduct a repeat investigation into Gagarin's crash: "The catastrophe does not concern domestic affairs or politics. It is a difficult question of aviation."

The group received the following answer from the presidential apparatus: "According to our information, there is no basis to doubt the conclusions drawn by the State Panel that investigated the catastrophe. As a result, we see no point in conducting an additional investigation."

But what conclusions did the Panel draw? Who has seen them?

Whoever classified the conclusions of the investigations as "Top Secret" in 1968 likely hoped that either they or future state employees would ultimately discover the truth about what happened on that fateful March day. For today, the pieces of the aircraft are still intact. They have been treated with an anti-corrosion layer and are hermetically sealed. They are currently stored at the Defense Ministry's 13th State Scientific Research Institute (where the initial investigation was conducted 40 years ago).

Theory: "They did everything right"

In 1968, Igor Ivanovich Kuznezov was a major and an employee at the Defense Ministry's 13th State Scientific Research Institute. He participated in the investigation into the crash. Today, he is confident that he knows what happened to the pilots based on the motion trajectory of the aircraft that he calculated at the crash zone.

The aircraft was depressurized while on the ground. The ventilation valve of Gagarin's cockpit was not completely closed. The pilots realized this when they were approaching an altitude of 4,200 meters and started their mission - "a figure 8." After learning the valve was open, they should have ended the flight and returned to the aerodrome. They should have dropped altitude immediately. Instead Seregin took control of the aircraft himself. The aircraft fell into a nosedive.

According to Kuznezov, the accelerative forces and initial effect of hypoxia weakened the pilots. The aircraft dropped at a rate of 145 meters per second. The pressure grew at an enormous rate in the cockpit.

"They lost control of the aircraft within 14 seconds, when the MiG-15UTI went into a nosedive from 4,100 to 2,000 meters," said Kuznezov. "Americans have had similar situations." As of 1975, medics prohibit pilots from dropping altitude at more than 50 meters per second.

At such a dangerous altitude, no one could pull the aircraft out of the nosedive. In 15 seconds, the aircraft hit the ground.

Documents from the personal archive of Aleksander Jeleznyakov were used in preparing this article.

Download a reprint of Komsomolskaya Pravda from April 13, 1961. (.pdf)