Yuri Gagarin is known and remembered by the whole world. The fate of the legendary cosmonaut turned out to be extremely tragic. He died in a plane crash while on a training flight. After this event, a nationwide mourning was declared in the Land of the Soviets, although Gagarin was not the head of state. The hero's remains were cremated and buried in the Kremlin wall.
Training flight
Having successfully defended his thesis at the Zhukovsky Academy, Gagarin, after a long break, began training flights on a training winged aircraft with dual controls. In a couple of weeks in March 1968, he made almost two dozen flights. Their total duration was seven hours. To begin a completely independent implementation of the program, Gagarin needed to carry out two more sorties paired with Vladimir Seryogin, Hero of the Soviet Union.
On March 27, 1968, both pilots in the MiG-15UTI took off from an airfield in the Moscow region. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. The visibility seemed good. The height of the cloud base was just under a kilometer. According to the calculations of specialists, the execution of the task in the area of the proposed piloting could not take the pilots more than twenty minutes. However, the pilots coped with the task even earlier, after which Yuri Alekseevich reported by radio communication about the completion of the task and asked "okay" to return to the take-off site. At this moment, communication with the training board was interrupted and was no longer resumed. It became clear that something had happened in the sky.
Search for the missing crew
When it became clear on the ground that the crew would run out of fuel, an intensified search for the aircraft began in the mission area. The operation lasted several hours. At about 15:00, a search helicopter discovered elements of the aircraft 65 kilometers from the take-off site. This was the area of the village of Novoselovo, which is in the Vladimir region.
Soon, a state commission was already working at the scene of the tragedy. The search engines found the remains of the bodies of both pilots, which were identified by colleagues, as well as relatives. The pilots' belongings were also found at the crash site, including a wallet containing driver's documents and a photo of designer Korolev. A fragment of Yuri Alekseevich's flight jacket was found on a tree branch.
Causes of the tragedy
The state commission had three important tasks to solve. It was necessary to study in detail the level of training of the deceased crew, to check how the flights were organized and provided that day. This was done by the flight subcommittee. The engineering part of the commission conducted a study of the remnants of the material part of the crashed aircraft. The third group, medical, had to assess the condition of the pilots before departure and during the flight.
The commission's report was carefully classified. The details of the verification carried out became known only later from the materials of the articles and from confidential conversations with some of the members of the commission. Officially, the reasons for the tragic event remained unclear.
The study of the clockwork showed that the tragic event took place at 10 hours 31 minutes, that is, about a minute after the end of the radio exchange with the ground services.
The commission made the following conclusion: when the air situation changed, the flight crew was forced to make a non-standard maneuver, after which the plane fell down and went into an uncontrollable spin. The pilots attempted to transfer the plane to a horizontal plane. However, the car collided with the surface of the earth, as a result of which the crew was killed.
No signs of equipment failure or malfunctions were identified during the inspection. A chemical analysis of the blood of the deceased was also carried out. He did not detect the presence of foreign substances.
Separate work was carried out by a special KGB commission. Her task was to find out whether the described tragedy was the result of a terrorist act or someone's malicious intent. The assumptions were not confirmed. However, the Chekists revealed many irregularities in the actions of the personnel who served the training flight.
The conclusions of the responsible commission were made public for the 50th anniversary of the first space flight. The most probable reason for the incident is called a non-standard and very sharp maneuver that took place during the evasion of the aircraft from interference. This hindrance could be, for example, a trace from another aircraft that appeared in the path of the crew. The result was the transfer of the machine beyond the critical mode, which led to the collapse of the aircraft to the ground.
By now, alternative versions of the incident have been put forward, including very exotic and incredible ones, including those that have a political background. The details of the death of cosmonaut Gagarin continue to excite many people.
