by Jamie Doran
If the forward pilot ejects first, the gas jets from his ejection mechanism will interfere with the rear compartment, thus making ejection from it impossible. Instead of finding a better technical solution, the designers made a ‘methodological’ decision without thinking about the consequences. The instructor had to be first to eject, which is contrary to common ethical standards.8
Kacharovsky’s point was that no instructor worth his salt wanted to leave a less experienced pilot to fend for himself in a stricken plane. The instructor would be honour-bound to get his pupil out of the plane first, before tending to his own survival. The arrangement aboard the MiG-15UTI flouted this honourable tradition. Though he can offer no proof that an ejection was ever attempted, or even considered, Kacharovsky suggested the following terrible scenario:
It is easy to imagine the situation. Serugin, as crew leader, ordered Gagarin to eject, but Gagarin understands that saving his own life exposes the life of his teacher and friend to danger. Each man thinks of the other.
Kacharovsky imagined the two men arguing the position, wasting valuable seconds until it was too late and they hit the ground. In fact, this scenario is more emotional than strictly logical. The MiG-15UTI designers had little choice in the ejection sequence. All two-seater jets around the world employ the same sequence, for a very simple reason. If the pilot in front ejects first, then the plane moves fractionally forward beneath him as he flies upwards. In the brief fractions of a second while he is still close to the top of the plane, the rear cockpit position passes directly under his ejection seat, so the rear pilot’s escape route is blocked for valuable fractions of a second. What’s more, the rocket blast from the first seat burns through the rear canopy, putting the other pilot’s life in grave danger. However, if the rear pilot ejects first, the man in front can then fire his own seat safely, because his rocket exhausts will trail over an empty rear cockpit position.9
There is no moral shame attached to this. The safety margin between the separate ejections is less than half a second. The supervising officer in the back seat issues the order to eject and immediately exits the aircraft. The cadet in the front seat responds so quickly afterwards that the difference in timing is barely significant.
Much more significant was the fact that the cockpit canopy frame was found among the wreckage. In a modern jet fighter a pilot in danger pulls a simple lever on his seat, and the elaborate ejection mechanisms take care of everything else, including the removal of the canopy. If worst comes to worst and the canopy does not come away properly, then a web of explosive wires built into the plexiglass shatters it, so that the seat can simply punch its way out. On the old MiG, however, a separate mechanical lever on the pilot’s left side had to be pulled first in order to dispose of the canopy. Only then could he eject. Obviously neither pilot had pulled the canopy jettison lever.
But the canopy frame in the wreckage did not have much plexiglass left within it. Most of the transparent material was shattered, and only a very small proportion was recovered at the wreck site. This was the only physical evidence in the entire investigation that directly suggested a mid-air collision of some kind. If the MiG had smashed into another plane, there would have been much more in-flight damage than merely the shattering of the canopy. The missing glass was suggestive of a grazing impact with a bird, or with the suspended instrument package of a stray weather balloon – and this is the principal explanation for the crash that the commission eventually settled on, based on the one solid piece of evidence: that the plexiglass was missing. Serugin and Gagarin lost control of their plane when the canopy shattered, and did not quite manage to recover.
The KGB conducted a parallel investigation, not just alongside the Air Force and the official commission members but against them. Their report also focused on the simplest possible explanation, as adopted by the commission, based on the shattered cockpit canopy. One of the KGB investigators, Nikolai Rubkin, today a ‘State security expert’, knows all aspects of the security service’s relationship to the early space effort. He is one of the few people who can gain access to the voluminous original report, stashed way even now in the bowels of the Lubyanka. He says, ‘The missing plexiglass in the canopy meant that something must have hit the cockpit before the crash. A bird strike would tend to hit the front of the canopy, not the top. An impact with an aircraft would have created much more damage. The missing glass is more consistent with an impact against the suspended instrument package of a weather balloon.’ So could the commission’s findings actually be correct? ‘The only indisputable fact is that the cockpit canopy glass was broken before the plane hit the ground,’ Rubkin says, carefully. ‘Everything else is guesswork. Only Gagarin and Serugin could tell us the truth about what really happened that day.’
Rubkin puts the investigation’s politics into broad perspective: ‘There were several sub-commissions investigating different areas. One of them dealt with the aircraft’s maintenance, another with pilot preparation, a third with the fuelling and tank installation, and a fourth examined all the medical matters. Finally there was another looking into any possibility of sabotage, or a revenge plot. That last was very much the KGB’s responsibility at the time.’ The problem – as so often with a high-profile and politically sensitive investigation – was that the five sub-commission teams did not communicate with each other. ‘Since there were several major institutions responsible for all these various areas, and the KGB had its own departments, the sub-commissions’ documentation was never assembled as one coherent package for the main commission. The reason was that too many interested parties worked for institutions that might have been found responsible for the crash. Certain people, whether we like it or not, adjusted the facts to save their honour. I found a report from General Mikoyan, the famous man who designed the MiG in the first place, saying that he was completely dissatisfied with the way the investigation was carried out.’
Alexei Leonov and Sergei Belotserkovsky also remained thoroughly dissatisfied with the commission’s work. They thought the weather-balloon theory was completely wrong. Leonov thinks he knows exactly what happened that day. ‘Another plane passed very close to Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG in the clouds, coming within ten, fifteen, twenty metres. The vortex [backwash] from the other plane turned the MiG upside-down and caused the loss of control and the crash.’
Leonov’s theory about aerodynamic interference from another plane provides a credible explanation for the disaster, except that such an ordinary problem should have been survivable. If backwash was a factor on March 27, Serugin should have been able to stabilize the MiG without too much difficulty. Major-General Yuri Khulikov, a former Air Force Chief of Flight Security Services, points out that the MiG-15 had been intensively flight-tested under simulated backwash conditions. Given a reasonable altitude for safety, any averagely experienced pilot should have been able to regain control. In January 1996 Khulikov gave an interview to Moscow News, in which he focused rather harshly on ‘pilot error’ as an explanation for the crash. ‘Even if Gagarin and Serugin got into a vortex stream, the MiG should have been recoverable. Such a vortex doesn’t much affect the engine. I’d like to point out, this conclusion was reached after a very stringent series of tests . . . Gagarin wasn’t at all prepared for such conditions . . . You must understand what the name “Gagarin” meant in our country at that time. It was a symbol of the victory of socialism in space. It seems that the First Cosmonaut couldn’t be capable of making mistakes.’10
But Khulikov has an axe to grind, since his loyalties lie with the original members of the 1968 investigating commission and those senior officers responsible for general air-traffic control at that time. Notably he forgot to mention that the MiG-15 and many other planes used in vortex recovery tests had never been fitted with drop-tanks because – and this is where the military logic goes round in circles – it was forbidden to fly drop-tanks in such extreme manoeuvres. Quite simply it never occurred to anyone to test MiG-15 training craft under
the most severe flying conditions with the tanks attached, because it would have been much too dangerous, even for the most experienced test pilot.
Clearly a backwash hitting a MiG with drop-tanks (as flown by Gagarin and Serugin) would have been more of a hazard than Major-General Khulikov likes to admit.
Alexei Leonov goes much further, insisting that it was not just ordinary backwash from another MiG, but a powerful supersonic shockwave from a brand-new, high-performance fighter that slammed into Gagarin’s and Serugin’s plane like a solid brick wall.
Leonov was always firmly convinced that the two bangs he had heard after he landed his helicopter at Kerzatch were made by two entirely different phenomena. The MiG-15UTI was fast, but far from supersonic. The distant bangs may have sounded faint from where he was standing at the time, but he was sure they were caused by an explosion and an additional supersonic boom. Therefore another, and much faster, aircraft must have entered the same airspace at the wrong moment. But when Leonov tried to persuade his fellow investigators to explore this theory, ‘all my attempts were stopped by some invisible wall. I understand that a Deputy Chief Commander was appointed to the accident commission. He was also in charge of the traffic control for that region, and he could have been responsible [for events on March 27], but he didn’t pay attention to them in his report. It could have been problematic.’
Leonov was unhappy about such obstruction. He was sure that the supersonic boom had not been a figment of his imagination. Eyewitnesses on the ground, near the crash zone, contributed some powerful supporting evidence, which again was not included in the final report. ‘Apart from the fact that I heard the sounds myself, three local dwellers were questioned separately. All of them said they’d seen smoke and fire coming out of a plane’s tail. Then it went up into the clouds. So it was a reversed process. Gagarin fell down to earth, but this other plane went upwards at great speed.’ The witnesses were shown aircraft identification charts, and all of them immediately picked out the distinctive outline of a new Sukhoi SU-11 supersonic jet, which looked nothing like an old MiG-15. ‘We knew that SU-11s could be in that area, but they were supposed to fly above 10,000 metres,’ says Leonov.
The ‘smoke and fire’ coming from the mysterious plane’s rear end were sharply suggestive of an afterburner at full thrust. The SU-11 included an afterburner, which was a relatively new piece of technology: a supercharger wherein the jet exhaust was re-ignited for extra thrust, particularly when the plane was pushing towards supersonic speed and beyond. At full thrust the SU-11 could achieve nearly twice the speed of sound. The antiquated subsonic MiG-15 did not have an afterburner and its exhaust stream was not noticeably fiery.
The evidence for this mysterious second aircraft in the area was supported by one of the air-traffic controllers on duty that day, Vyacheslav Bykovsky, who told the commission that he had seen two other target blips on his radar screen, one of which was approaching from the east. Apparently that signal continued to register on his screen for at least two minutes after Gagarin had crashed. In fact, the timing of the crash was hard to define. Seismometers in Moscow registered a signal at 10.31 in the morning, consistent with an aircraft impact, but Bykovsky says, ‘To this day I don’t believe Gagarin fell at that time, because we lost contact with him on the radar at forty-one minutes past, not thirty-one.’ Then he contradicts himself, saying that the MiG’s chronometer was found among the wreckage, jammed at 10.31. ‘Who knows what all this means? There are so many possibilities. Maybe the people in Moscow recorded some other shock before the crash. I don’t know. I went to Star City a year after Gagarin’s death, and the tour guide said he died at 10.41. A year afterwards they said he died at 10.31. There’s a big difference.’
Immediately after the crash, Bykovsky and the other controllers in his station were placed under security, and their evidence at the time was carefully filtered. Today he says, ‘There were two other planes in the area. We knew about them. The generals on the commission gathered us all together and we explained to them what we’d seen, but we were segregated and we didn’t work again for more than a week. People were questioned about the other plane [the plane which may have interfered with Gagarin’s and Serugin’s flight] and many said they’d seen it.’
As Bykovsky demonstrates, the testimony about radar signals is complex and ambiguous. He readily admits that the tracking equipment was unable to keep simultaneous tabs on both the positions and altitudes of nearby aircraft. ‘Either the blips on the screen appear or they disappear. If a plane changes altitude, it disappears for ten seconds, so the signal on a radar screen isn’t always constant. At forty kilometres’ distance from the airbase the signals disappear altogether.’
Leonov says that Bykovsky’s report of at least one – and possibly two – additional target on his radar screen was discounted by the commission. ‘It was attributed to his lack of experience. They took him away somewhere, and I don’t know exactly what happened to him. In any case, none of this appeared in the subsequent documentation. The fact that I provided this information [about the two bangs] and spoke to people who saw the other plane – this wasn’t enough for the commission. That’s why no one knows about the other plane, except its pilot and his conscience.’
In fact, a second MiG pilot, Andrei Koloshov, emerged from obscurity in April 1995 to admit that he was indeed flying in the area at the time. In the journal Argumenti i Fakti (Arguments and Facts) he said, ‘The cause of Gagarin’s death was that he was reckless in taking an unjustifiable risk. He and Serugin deviated from their proper flight pattern.’11 Koloshov suggested that the two men agreed to fly away from their designated zone in search of clearer weather, so that they could at least try out some basic manoeuvres. He presented absolutely no evidence to support his theory. Perhaps he had a guilty conscience. The original traffic-control voice tapes (finally unearthed by Leonov and Belotserkovsky in 1986 after a long battle with the authorities) show that, far from flying recklessly, Serugin had cut an intended 20-minute training session down to five minutes because of the poor weather. Bykovsky remembers without prompting that the last voice communication from Serugin was to say that ‘their job was done. He told us everything he was doing. He had completed the training task and he asked for permission to come out of [the current flight zone]. Then the radio link was lost.’
Koloshov’s charge of recklessness on Serugin’s part seems unjust, but today Leonov is not concerned with the MiG pilot’s ungenerous testimony, because he is still convinced that this pilot and his subsonic MiG-15 were utterly irrelevant and had nothing to do with Gagarin’s death. ‘No MiG-15 could have made the supersonic bang that I heard that morning.’ Leonov and Belotserkovsky still assert that a supersonic Sukhoi SU-11, never firmly identified in the confused radar data, was the true culprit – in the air, at least.
Leonov is generous towards the SU-11’s pilot, whoever he may have been. ‘If he’d been identified at the time, he’d have been torn to pieces by an angry crowd. On the one hand, they should have released this information; but on the other, if we think about it wisely, perhaps not. It wouldn’t remedy anything.’ It was not so much a single pilot but ‘the whole system that allowed for Gagarin’s death. The entire system. You can’t take the entire system to court. You can judge it morally, but you can’t punish it.’
The ‘system’ did not want to be judged or punished. In all, the commission’s report accumulated twenty-nine thick volumes of technical data, but the mere appearance of fact-gathering was not the same as making a fair analysis of the causes. The 1968 commission report’s central judgement was deliberately vague and simplistic: ‘an aggregate of causes’. The main thesis – the grazing impact with a weather balloon – suited everyone because it was the most innocent. No one was to blame – at least, no one on the ground.
One of the commission’s hardest-working investigators, Igor Rubstov, supported Leonov’s and Belotserkovsky’s theory that a supersonic aircraft had come close to colliding with Gagarin’
s and Serugin’s MiG. As the commission moved ever further away from this difficult territory, Rubstov gathered all his courage and went to the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka to argue his case. ‘I can’t say I felt too confident in that particular building.’ He met Colonel Dugin of the KGB, who demanded to know why he was insisting on the collision theory. Rubstov bluffed in classic Russian style. ‘I said that if the commission failed to investigate [the near-collision scenario], people might think there was something to hide. It was better to investigate it properly to demonstrate that it was not the true version of events.’ Colonel Drugin was unimpressed. On his desk there was a slim folder, which he now opened. It turned out to be Rubstov’s personal file. ‘You don’t honour discipline very much, do you?’ the Colonel said.
Rubstov knew that he was referring to an incident during the war, when an aviation unit at Stalingrad had retreated, quite justifiably, to a safer position under intense German attack. For twenty years and more, no particular inference had been drawn from this event. Drugin now implied that he could use this ancient story as proof of Rubstov’s cowardice, simply because he had been a member of the retreating unit. Drugin did not have to make this threat in so many words. He merely opened the personal file at the relevant page so that Rubstov could catch a glimpse of its contents, then asked him to reconsider his ideas about the near-collision scenario. ‘Later on, this version was not confirmed,’ Rubstov forlornly admits.
Leonov and his closest colleagues wanted to learn the truth about the crash. It took them the best part of two decades, but in 1986 Belotserkovsky lobbied successfully for a new commission of inquiry. He gained access to the secret investigation documents and original supporting materials, including unedited voice tapes of the air-to-ground dialogue. Meanwhile Leonov was amazed to find that documents supposedly written by him in 1968 as part of the original commission of inquiry were in someone else’s handwriting. ‘They were rewritten, and certain effects were falsified.’ Leonov’s accusation comes as no great surprise to security expert Nikolai Rubkin. ‘I can’t exclude that possibility. We’ve never had any problem in our country finding people to forge signatures. There have always been plenty of ranch-hands skilled in this kind of art.’
