Tu-104 - the world's second jet passenger liner, and the first to withstand the test of many years of operation. The British "Comet", which was ahead of him by several years, went down in history after several disasters caused by flaws in the design. The Tu-104 was destined for a long flight life - for more than 20 years these aircraft transported passengers on the air lines of the USSR and other countries.
Tu-104
The design of the Tu-104 began in the spring of 1954, based on the already created Tu-16 strategic bomber. This greatly facilitated the work, and already in September 1954, the preliminary design of the Tu-104 was presented to the Air Force.
During the creation of the Tu-104, special attention was paid to ensuring high reliability of the aircraft structure, as well as increasing the resource of the airframe and especially the pressurized cabin. Bearing in mind the problems that the British faced with the "Comet", during the implementation of the program for the creation of the Tu-104, its airframe for the first time in domestic practice was subjected to cyclic tests in the new specially built hydro-basin of TsAGI. These tests made it possible to identify weak points in the structure, carry out pre-work and ensure its required durability.
The first flight of the experienced Tu-104 made June 17, 1955, and at the end of the year began mass production... The pioneer of the development of the Tu-104 civil air fleet was a specially organized in the capital's Vnukovo airport a division of jet aircraft. It was also the first training unit in which the crews of other airlines were retrained for new jet technology.
September 15, 1956 Tu-104 made its first regular flight with passengers on the route Moscow-Irkutsk, the plane was piloted by the crew headed by the commander of the ship E.P. Barabash. On October 12, the first regular international flight to Prague - the ship's commander B.P. Bugaev (future chief pilot L.I.Brezhnev, and then the head of the Soviet Civil Air Fleet). Regular operation of the aircraft began, which opened a new era not only in the development of domestic civil aviation, but also pushed the development of world jet passenger aviation. The Tu-104 became the world's first jet airliner successfully mastered at the Civil Air Fleet; it was behind this that the Boeing 707, the Comet-4, and the French Caravel were put into operation for civil aviation. Reactive passenger aviation has become a reality available to the widest range of passengers in many countries.
But in the history of the Tu-104, not everything was cloudless. Less than two years after the start of operation, the first loss occurred - on February 19, 1958, the board of the USSR-L5414, leaving Moscow, closed by clouds, to an alternate airfield, fell during the landing approach due to an incorrect calculation of the amount of fuel. This is a typical example of the "human factor", but on August 15 of the same year, the Tu-104A USSR-L5442, performing the Khabarovsk-Irkutsk-Moscow flight, crashed for unknown reasons in the Birobidzhan area. Something happened at the cruise flight level (about 10,000 meters) and the car lost altitude in a matter of minutes and crashed in the taiga. In those years, there were no flight recorders - "black boxes", and it was not possible to establish the causes of the disaster.
A fatal error was hidden in the design of the Tu-104, which the Tupolev Design Bureau and specialized research institutes tried unsuccessfully for several months. Test flights were carried out in different modes - no serious problems were identified. At the same time, dozens of Tu-104s continued to carry passengers.
October 17, 1958 new Tu-104A with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of the most experienced pilot Harold Kuznetsov, performed the flight Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. In the salon were mainly foreign citizens - a delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists.
The weather in Moscow was bad, and at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after the Kazan overflight, the dispatcher ordered to turn around and follow to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "catch" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane, as it were, "reared up", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell onto the wing and went into a tailspin.
In the situation that arose, the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft. But the lack of elevator travel prevented the car from being taken out of lethal mode. Harold Kuznetsov, knowing that the Birobidzhan story might be repeating itself, ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground. He conveyed just a few words - "catching up", "the stabilizer is not enough", "we are dying, pass it on to our relatives." The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky region of Chuvashia, a few tens of meters from the canvas railroad Moscow-Kazan-Sverdlovsk, near the village of Bulatovo. Killed 65 passengers and 9 crew members.
Now only old residents of the surrounding villages can point out this place - there is no monument or cross on it. The plaque installed by the author is unlikely to live for a long time.
Birches at the crash site. View from Apnerka.
Monument to Harold Kuznetsov at the Donskoy cemetery in Moscow.
The information transmitted by the crew was enough to find and fix the problem. The aircraft centering rules were changed, the stabilizer angle was changed and the elevator was modified. The maximum flight altitude has also been reduced. The aircraft's tendency to "catch" has been greatly reduced.
After that, the Tu-104 carried passengers for another three decades, and although there were some disasters (after all, about 200 planes were built and flew), their reasons were already different. For a long time, the Tu-104 became the main passenger aircraft of Aeroflot: for example, in 1960, a third of the passenger air traffic in the USSR was carried out on the Tu-104. For 23 years of operation, the fleet of Tu-104 aircraft carried about 100 million passengers, having spent 2,000,000 flight hours in the air and performed more than 600,000 flights.
Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeniy Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight mechanic
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatiana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant
In the text, materials from the site of the Tupolev ASTC were used.
The design flaws of the Tu-104 led to terrible disaster October 17, 1958. Thanks to the clear actions of the crew commander, who until the last commented on everything that happened, more such tragedies did not happen to this model of "carcass".
Exactly 56 years ago, on October 17, 1958, 22 km from the city of Kanash of the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, a Soviet Tu-104 aircraft of the Aeroflot airline crashed. A delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists was on board. All 80 people on board were killed. An interesting fact: it was in the 50s that a song to the motive of the funeral march “Tu-104 is the best plane” was played among the people. The plane on the Beijing-Moscow flight has already passed most paths. The commander of the crew was Harold Kuznetsov. Due to fog in Moscow, the plane was denied landing. At the Gorky alternate airfield, the weather also did not allow landing. After overflying Kazan, the dispatcher ordered to turn around and follow to the Sverdlovsk airport suitable for landing. At about 21:00 the plane passes Omsk. At an altitude of 10 thousand meters, the crew began to turn towards the alternate airfield in Sverdlovsk. Suddenly the plane was thrown upward as from a strong blow. The machine quickly gained altitude, then rolled onto its back and began a sharp dive. The instruments went out of order almost immediately, it was impossible to understand where the earth was and where the sky was. The crew and passengers were doomed and perhaps they already guessed about it. They say that at such moments, a person's whole life flashes before his eyes.
Causes of the disaster
It should be noted that the plane was completely new. The year of its release coincided with the year of the disaster. The very first flight of a Soviet jet passenger airliner took place a year earlier - in June 1955. Tu-104 then became a kind of national brand. People wanted to fly it. Can we say that there were flaws in the design of the aircraft? One thing is clear for sure: thanks to the latest messages from the crew commander from the crashed airliner, changes were made to it, and in the future there were no cases similar to this catastrophe with Tu-104 aircraft. On that unfortunate day, the Tu-104 fell into a powerful ascending turbulent stream. At an altitude of about 13 thousand meters, he lost speed and went into an almost vertical dive. Then there was a "catch". The plane, as it were, "reared up", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on the wing and went into a tailspin. It was established that the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft, but the lack of elevator travel prevented the aircraft from leveling out. Even when it became clear that the plane was doomed, Harold Kuznetsov continued, without panic, to clearly comment on everything that was happening and ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground. By the way, he shouldn't have been on that flight. Kuznetsov asked his friend Andrei Gorbachev to trade with him. He agreed. “This is pure mysticism,” commented the daughter of Harold Kuznetsov for the film “The Last Words of the Pilot Kuznetsov”. - He always knew that he would not live long. He said, "I will soon die, and you will live a long time." At 21:30 the last message was received from the crashed plane: “End. Farewell. Tell your family ... " Tatiana Matyanina
Experimental aircraft "104" developed by the Tupolev Design Bureau took off for the first time on June 17, 1955 from an airfield near Moscow in Zhukovsky. This is how the factory tests of the machine began, which by the autumn of the same year had turned into a TU-104 jet airliner - the third in the world, the second put into operation and the first in the USSR.
Tu-104
When creating the first Soviet jet liner, the Tupolev Design Bureau took the Tupolev bomber as a basis (the 104 plane even at one time bore the TU-16P index - "passenger") in order to reduce resources and time for general design development. Thus, the task of training flight technical personnel was also facilitated, and they also saved on ground maintenance equipment.
Tu-16
As one of the arguments in favor of creating such an aircraft, Alexey Tupolev cited the possibility of flying to high altitude, "Over the weather", while the propeller-driven passenger aircraft, which had a small ceiling, suffered mercilessly from turbulence. But it was there that a new, as yet unknown danger awaited the first jet liner.
Over the entire history of operation, 37 cars have suffered serious accidents - 18% of the total number of vehicles produced. At the same time, it should be noted that the 104th behaved more decently in flight than its English competitor Comet, the De Havilland company (23% of lost vehicles), which had an unhealthy habit of falling apart in the air due to fatigue loads in a careless the projected fuselage.
The first regular flight TU-104 made on September 15, 1956. Aeroflot's crew on an aircraft with tail number USSR-L5438 made the first flight from Moscow to New York on a route passing through London, Keflavik and Goose Bay. The liner stayed in the air for 13 hours and 29 minutes. And on September 15, 1956, the flight Moscow-Khabarovsk TU-104 with the tail number USSR-L5413 began regular operation of jet vehicles.
But from the very beginning of flights on the new liner, the pilots were in for an unpleasant surprise. In the course of further operation during the flight, the TU-104, for no apparent reason, sometimes unexpectedly threw upward, after which it lost control, fell into a spin and began to dive. The pilots called this "catch" effect. After the "pickup" made itself felt, the best scientists and testers were involved in the study of this phenomenon. Several institutions have dealt with this problem alone.
Harold Kuznetsov participated in these tests as a test pilot for Aeroflot. He constantly argued with his superiors, convincing that the car did not have enough elevator to take the car out of the dive. Tupolev believed that the "pickup" had other reasons, ignoring the opinion civilian pilot... In the meantime, the country's prestige was at stake.
Harold Kuznetsov
Khrushchev liked the Tu-104 so much that he decided to make his visit to Great Britain in 1956 on it. But due to the above problems, it was with difficulty that he was dissuaded from this. The Soviet delegation went to London on a cruiser. But in order to prove the Soviet technological superiority (the British Comet rival of the TU-104 did not fly due to a series of mysterious disasters), Khrushchev ordered the TU-104 to be driven to London.
The arrival of the Soviet airliner, according to the British press, had an effect comparable to the landing of a UFO. The next day, the second TU-104 flew to London, with a different number. The British newspapers reported that it was one and the same plane, and the "Russian priests" "were repainting the numbers on their experimental plane." "Russian priests" are Russian pilots dressed in all black. Chief designer Alexei Tupolev was offended, and, firstly, ordered to allocate funds to the pilots to dress in something fashionable and not black, and the next day - March 25, 1956, send three TU-104s to London at once, which was executed. It was a triumph - after all, at that time no other country in the world had operating jet passenger airliners. After the return of the liners from London to Moscow, Tupolev personally greeted the crews.
Two years later, Harold Kuznetsov represented the Tu-104 in Belgium, and after returning from Brussels, he was arrested by KGB agents. The reason for his arrest was an absurd incident. Before the flight to Brussels, the TU-104 was shown to the country's leadership. Kuznetsov turned the plane around while taxiing, and a member of the Politburo Shepilov blew off his hat. Organizational conclusions followed immediately - it was decided to punish the commander after returning from the exhibition. As a result, Kuznetsov was removed from office and appointed co-pilot for a period of six months. During this time, he was engaged in test work at Aeroflot.
In October 1958, Kuznetsov returned to work as a line pilot on the TU-104. He became the commander again. By this time he was 35 years old, he was raising his daughter alone. Harold had many friends who called him the "Musketeer." In 1957, a new flight attendant appeared in Harold's crew - Alla Maklakova.
And this is the conductor Alla Maklakova. Harold is divorced and has a daughter alone. Everyone knows that he is in love with Alla. Therefore, they often fly in the same carriage ...
Meanwhile, the problem with the tossing of the Tu-104 aircraft did not go away. Despite all the efforts of the designers and testers, the problem of the airliner with the "pickup" was not solved. The first alarming signal was a flight incident on May 16, 1958, when the Czechoslovak TU-104, traveling at an altitude of 12,000 meters, fell into a zone of thunderstorm activity. Almost immediately, both engines shut off. The plane began to fall and only at an altitude of 4000 meters the crew was able to subjugate the car, start one engine and land at a military airfield near Prague.
A month later, on June 22, the TU-104A flying Irkutsk-Khabarovsk at an altitude of 12,500 meters fell into a powerful updraft and ended up at an altitude of 13,500 meters, from where it began to randomly fall to an altitude of 11,500 meters. After the "stall" and loss of altitude, the crew commander, pilot Polbin, managed to bring the plane into horizontal flight. Two prerequisites, it seemed, should have made both Aeroflot leaders and leaders think. aviation industry... But that did not happen.
Unfortunately, we didn't have to wait long. The first disaster occurred in the Birobidzhan area. In August 1958, the TU-104A, following the Khabarovsk-Irkutsk flight, at an altitude of 10,800 meters, in perfectly clear weather, was thrown by an ascending gust of air to an altitude of 12,000 meters. The commander of the ship, pilot Bykov, was unable not only to cope with the "rebellious" machine, but to convey to the ground about what had happened. A month later, the plane of the pilot Zhelbakov was thrown from an altitude of 9000 meters to 11,500 meters.
Another disaster struck two months later. He was not supposed to fly to Beijing, the plan included the name of another pilot - Anatoly Gorbachev. But Kuznetsov himself asked his comrade for a replacement, and Gorbachev did not want to refuse his friend.
On October 17, 1958, Tu-104 with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of Harold Kuznetsov, performed the flight Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. In the salon were mainly foreign citizens - a delegation of Chinese and North Korean party officials.
The weather in Moscow was bad, and at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after the Kazan overflight, the dispatcher ordered to turn around and follow to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "catch" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane, as it were, "reared up", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell onto the wing and went into a tailspin.
The crew did not understand what was happening. However, there was no time to guess. Commander Harold Kuznetsov knew only one thing for sure - it was necessary at all costs to level the car. Together with the co-pilot Anton Artyomov, they gave the wheel away from themselves to the stop, but nothing worked. They lacked elevators.
After the plane was suddenly thrown, he just as suddenly rolled over onto his back and began to go into a tailspin. The devices are out of order. It was impossible to understand where the earth was and where the sky was. Weightlessness set in in the cabin. Not obeying the rudders, the TU-104 instantly went into an uncontrolled dive. Almost vertically, developing supersonic speed, the liner rushed to the ground. At the end of this dive, "TU" literally demolished several telegraph poles along the railroad track. From the impact, the fuselage broke in half. The remains of the crew and passengers were subsequently found by rescuers within a radius of almost two kilometers.
As the state commission later established, the fall lasted two minutes. But already from a height of thirteen kilometers Kuznetsov began to scrupulously transmit to the ground what was happening with the car. I relayed it myself: on the steering wheel of the TU-104 there was a special button connected to a microphone. The radio operator Alexander Fedorov duplicated these messages. Communication continued almost until the very collision with the ground. The last words of the commander were: “Farewell, relatives. We are dying. "
The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky region of Chuvashia. 71 passengers and 9 crew members were killed.
The information transmitted from the aircraft in distress turned out to be truly invaluable. Prior to that, none of the thoroughly conducted investigations, in which specialists from the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, the State Research Institute, the Tupolev Design Bureau, and the Air Force participated, managed to shed light on the reasons for the mysterious accidents of the TU-104. Everything was attributed to the so-called "human factor". At one analysis, having heard enough complaints from the flight crew about the behavior of the machine, the offended Tupolev threw in his hearts: “This is not a bad plane, you don’t know how to fly it!”.
Harold Kuznetsov placed the dots over the "i". As the analysis of the information obtained thanks to him showed, the plane got into a gigantic updraft. None of the creators of new aircraft even suspected that such a thing was possible at such transcendental, over nine kilometers, heights. After all, the "ceilings" of piston machines were incomparably less. And so the designers argued: jet machines will fly "over the weather."
It was so until that tragic evening. The crew of Harold Kuznetsov was doubly lucky. Not only did it get caught in a vertical air stream, it ended up at its very epicenter. After performing several simulated flights, the specialists were able to determine the parameters of this stream. Its length was 9-13 kilometers, width - almost 2, thickness up to 6 ... The speed was also huge - 300 kilometers per hour.
As a matter of urgency, the designers began to look for ways to deal with the formidable natural phenomenon... The “ceilings” were lowered, the structure was modernized, and recommendations for alignment were developed. aircraft... Bitter experience helped to create other aerodynamic forms that successfully resist air currents. In particular, the designers of the new IL-b2 intercontinental airliner invented a special "tooth" on the leading edge of the swept wing of the aircraft. Thanks to him, even getting into a powerful vertical stream, "IL" independently lowered its nose.
After that, the TU-104 planes carried passengers for another three decades, and although there were some disasters (after all, about 200 planes were built and flew), their reasons were already different. For a long time, the TU-104 became the main passenger aircraft of Aeroflot: for example, in 1960, a third of the passenger air traffic in the USSR was carried out on the TU-104. For 23 years of operation, the fleet of TU-104 aircraft carried about 100 million passengers, having spent 2,000,000 flight hours in the air and performed more than 600,000 flights.
Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeniy Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight mechanic
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatiana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant
Worthy life. Death met with dignity ... And many lives saved in the future.
"Russian miracle" - this is how the first Soviet jet liner in the West was dubbed. Nikita Khrushchev was so amazed by this aircraft that he was even going to make an official visit to London in 1956 on an experimental, non-production aircraft.
At the world exhibition "Expo-58" Tu-104 is awarded the main prize. However, few people realize that, in fact, not everything was so smooth with the "Russian Miracle". Just at this time, mysterious incidents begin to occur ...
This film is about how, at the cost of their own lives, the crew of Harold Kuznetsov helped the designers and scientists to "bring" the plane, as well as about real story, known to theatergoers and moviegoers under the title "104 pages about love ...".
Brief curriculum vitae
Harold Dmitrievich Kuznetsov (August 1923, USSR - October 17, 1958, near Apnerka station, Vurnarsky district, Chuvash ASSR, RSFSR, USSR) - Soviet pilot, commander of the Tu-104A crew that crashed on October 17, 1958.On October 17, 1958, a new Tu-104A with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of Harold Kuznetsov, performed the flight Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. A delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists was in the salon.
Due to bad weather in Moscow and at the alternate airfield, the Gorky dispatcher ordered to turn around and follow to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the plane got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "catch" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on the wing and went into a tailspin (before that, for the same reason, several Tu-104 crashes had already occurred and no one could establish the cause).
In the situation that arose, the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft. But the lack of elevator travel prevented the car from being taken out of lethal mode. Even when it became clear that the plane was doomed, the commander of the crew, Harold Kuznetsov, continued without panic, to clearly comment on everything that was happening and ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground (Thanks to these comments, the necessary changes were made to the aircraft design, which in the future made it possible to avoid such disasters ). The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky region of Chuvashia, a few tens of meters from the Moscow-Kazan-Sverdlovsk railroad, not far from the village of Bulatovo. Killed 65 passengers and 9 crew members.
At the end of the fifties, several mysterious incidents happened to the first-borns of jet technology - Tu-104 aircraft: in flight, as if for no reason at all, the car began to behave like an enraged mustang. Why? The question remained unanswered until October 1958, when the pilot Harold Kuznetsov decided it. True, the price of truth turned out to be too expensive - life.
October 17, 1958. About 21 hours. Tu-104, led by commander Harold Kuznetsov, confidently walked at a given echelon. The Beijing-Moscow flight was nearing completion. Omsk was left behind, where was the last stopover. In the salons, apart from the measured roar of the engines, a sleepy silence gradually settled. Although the passengers this time turned out to be mostly noisy people: youth delegations from China and Korea flew to the Komsomol congress, but they were gradually overcome by fatigue from the long journey.
- We passed Kazan, - the navigator Yevgeny Mumrienko reported.
And from Kazan to the house is already a stone's throw. A little more - and the dispatcher of the Moscow air zone will take them into his "arms" ...
- There is a heavy fog in Moscow. I forbid landing, ”the commander suddenly heard the dispassionate voice of the Vnukovo airport dispatcher.
You will not say anything - a surprise. Go to the spare? But none of the nearest airfields - neither in Kazan, nor in Gorky - was still suitable for the firstborn of jet technology. Wrong runways. Sverdlovsk remained. So, a U-turn to one hundred and eighty and there?
- Please accept us, - Kuznetsov again connects with the "land". - I can land the plane. I guarantee.
It is now the commander in a similar situation can accept final decision... But then he did not have such a right. And the dispatcher did not want to risk it. He was relentless:
- Go back to Sverdlovsk. Tu-104 slowly, as if reluctantly, began to turn ... And then something happened. As if someone's invisible giant hand grabbed the machine in an iron vice and threw it up sharply. Moreover, the force of this throw was so powerful that the multi-ton colossus, like a balloon escaped from the hands, soared up immediately ... for more than two (!) Kilometers. Have you ever seen the "Cobra" made by test pilots on the Su-37? The car seems to be sitting on its tail, and its nose is raised high. So the Tu-104 found itself in almost the same position. And all this - not even in a matter of seconds. Fractions of a second.
The plane was shaking like a fever. Overloads fell like a leaden weight. The crew did not understand what was happening. However, there was no time to guess. It was compressed to an instant. The commander knew only one thing for sure - it was necessary at all costs to align the car. Together with the co-pilot Anton Artyomov, they gave the steering wheel away from themselves to the stop. Nothing worked. The elevators were simply not enough. It's like a door that you are trying to open wide, but it is made in such a way that it can only open halfway ...
The fight with the insidious, but most importantly, unknown enemy was still going on, when he again showed his unbridled temper. If the plane had just suddenly been thrown, now it was just as suddenly thrown down. Not obeying the rudders, the Tu-104 instantly went into an uncontrolled dive. Almost vertically, developing supersonic speed, the airliner rushed to the ground ... When a little more than two kilometers remained before the collision with it, Harold Kuznetsov, overcoming unthinkable stress, made his last efforts to transfer the car to a gentle gliding. Alas. "Tu" literally demolished several telegraph poles along the railroad track. From the blows, the fuselage broke in half ... The remains of the crew and a hundred passengers were later found within a radius of almost two kilometers.
As the state commission established, this game with death lasted two minutes. Not more.
When did Harold Dmitrievich realize that the plane was dying? Hard to say. However, what's the difference? Another thing is important: already from a height of thirteen kilometers Kuznetsov began to scrupulously transmit to the ground what was happening with the machine. Can you imagine? As if on a scheduled test flight! As if there was no such monstrous representation of light. "Altitude ... Speed ... Roll ... And so, instant by instant. I was transmitting it myself: there was a special button connected to a microphone on the steering wheel of the Tu-104. Radio operator Alexander Fedorov duplicated these messages. Communication continued almost until the collision with the ground. The last words of the commander were: "Goodbye, relatives. We are dying. "
The information transmitted from the board in distress turned out to be not even worth its weight in gold, but truly invaluable. Prior to that, none of the thoroughly conducted investigations, in which specialists from the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, the State Research Institute, the Tupolev Design Bureau, and the Air Force participated, managed to shed light on the causes of the mysterious accidents of the Tu-104. Defects in construction, technical problems? No, everything seems to be fine. Bad weather conditions? And you can't find fault with them. The so-called "human factor" remained. And bumps fell on the pilots' heads: they say, their lack of professionalism is to blame. It was difficult to argue on the basis of the available data.
Harold Kuznetsov placed the dots above the "i". What happened after all? As shown by the analysis of the information received, the plane got into a giant updraft. None of the creators of new aircraft even suspected that such a thing was possible at such transcendental, over nine kilometers, heights. After all, the "ceilings" of piston machines were incomparably less. That is why even venerable designers asserted: jet machines will fly "over the weather." Thunderstorms below. No fog, no rain. Turbulence? Little things, they said.
It was so until that tragic evening. The crew of Harold Kuznetsov was doubly lucky. Not only did he fall into a vertical air stream, he also found himself at its very epicenter. After performing several simulated flights, the specialists were able to determine the parameters of this stream. Length 9-13, width - almost 2, thickness up to 6 ... No, not meters: the count went for kilometers! Moreover, its speed was also enormous - 300 kilometers per hour.
So, the delusions were dispelled. As a matter of urgency, the designers began to search for ways to deal with the formidable natural phenomenon. The "ceilings" were lowered, the structure was modernized, and recommendations for aircraft alignment were developed. Bitter experience helped to create in general other aerodynamic forms that successfully resist air currents. In particular, the designers of the new IL-b2 intercontinental airliner invented a special "tooth" on the leading edge of the aircraft's huge swept wing. Thanks to him, even getting into a powerful vertical stream, "IL" lowers its nose on its own ...
