In Shchelkovo near Moscow, at the Chkalovsky airfield in 1968, on March 27 at 10 hours 15 minutes, a fighter of the UTI MiG-15 park took off, which has become historically famous. Onboard-625 lifted up the world famous cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who in this flight performed the functions of a pilot, and his accompanying instructor Vladimir Seregin. They carried out their next flight mission, and, breaking through the lower edge of the cloud at an altitude of 900 meters, went to the planned flight. Why did the plane never return to base? What happened during the flight over Kirzhach, why did the MiG-15 start to fall and then crash? Why weren't the pilots ejected from the aircraft during the crash before hitting the earth's surface?
During the investigation of the plane crash and the death of two pilots, mystical warning signs began to be clearly drawn, which, as if by fate itself, indicated the need to postpone the fatal fatal flight. So, for example, it turned out that it was on the day of the tragedy that the always punctual Gagarin left his pass at home for the first time in his entire service. At the checkpoint, of course, they knew him by sight and would definitely let him in, but Yuri Alekseevich decided to go back for a pass (this is a terribly bad omen among the flight personnel). For this reason, the test pilot arrived at the scene a little later than usual, but managed to take off by the time of the planned takeoff of the training two-seater. This flight, accompanied by an experienced partner, was supposed to be the last test of the readiness of test pilot Yu. Gagarin to perform independent flights on MiG-15 class fighters.
Unexpected was the delay of the regiment commander V. S. Seregin himself at the time of departure, scheduled for exactly 10 o'clock in the morning. But for a front-line pilot of assault aviation, a test pilot of the first class, being late was completely uncharacteristic. This was the second mystical call of fate to the participants in the tragic incident in the sky over Kirzhach. As it turned out, Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Seregin at that time was summoned to the high authorities, where he had a very unpleasant conversation with General Kuznetsov. The disciplinary separation of the pilot by the command before the departure was another bad omen accompanying the upcoming takeoff of the 625.
The fighter was tracked on the ground by the command post radar stations, and the pilots maintained stable radio communications until the last minute. Yuri Gagarin completed all the planned piloting tasks, and at half past ten he reported this to the dispatchers. Then the pilot requested permission to turn around to the flight base in order to return. After that, there was no more communication with the plane.
Rescue helicopters swept the territory along the entire manned area in search of the suddenly missing fighter. Only 3 hours later, the destroyed parts of the fighter were found 65 kilometers from the airfield. The angle of fall of the aircraft was approximately 50 degrees, the preliminary estimate of the speed of the car at the moment of hitting the ground was about 700 km / h A powerful explosion broke the plane into small pieces, scattering them 300 meters around. The nose of the aircraft went into the earth's soil by almost 4 meters. The location of the remains of the bodies of the pilots showed that during the disaster they took a working position at the helm.
The atmosphere of mystery around the tragedy with the first astronaut on Earth has given rise to a huge number of different versions and implausible rumors. The effect of mystery was enhanced by the materials of this investigation, which were classified in the military archives, by a specially created commission of technical experts. The official wording in the expert opinion of the commission was as follows: “the plane made a sharp maneuvering, which was associated with the need to turn away from an extraneous target. The fighter went into a tailspin and hit the ground, and the crew members were killed."
What kind of an extraneous target it was and why it was not recognized either on the ground by radars and flight dispatchers, or visually and on instruments by the pilots themselves, remained unknown. The reason for the depressurization of the aircraft cabin at an altitude of four and a half thousand kilometers could not be a flock of birds, too high for birds. Such an object could be a meteorological probe, or even an unknown unidentified flying object (UFO).
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But if the aircraft hit a meteorological balloon in the sky, the destruction of the cockpit windows would begin in the air, and the fragments would be scattered over a long distance. However, in reality, the engineers found absolutely all the glass fragments inside the crater formed during the crash.
There was a version of the "human factor", allegedly the death of the world-famous cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and his instructor on the MiG-15UTI fighter was associated with an erroneous command from the ground. This version was put forward by a member of the flight subcommittee, which was part of a large government commission to investigate the causes of the high-profile disaster, pilot and doctor of technical sciences Arseny Mironov.
The version with a flying saucer of aliens also has the right to exist, because even today UFOs are constantly observed over the Gagarin forest in the Kirzhach region of the Vladimir region. Perhaps, under the influence of alien radiation, the altitude sensors provided the crew with erroneous data, twice the actual values, which ultimately did not allow the aircraft to be taken out of the steep spiral dive in time.
On the evening of March 28, the remains of the dead pilots were cremated. The funeral urns were buried in the Kremlin wall on March 30. Throughout the Soviet Union, for the first time in the history of the country, a nationwide mourning was declared in connection with the death of people, by the nature of their activities, not directly related to the communist administrative apparatus of the state.
No one still knows for certain what actually happened in the cloudy sky of the Moscow region on that fateful day, although there is one very bold version, but it concerns the secrets of the USSR's international policy, which have no statute of limitations … What exactly caused the sharp the maneuver of the fighter, the investigation failed to establish. All other hypotheses of the causes of the plane crash were able to explain only part of the oddities and inconsistencies in the death of the Hero of the Earth who had been in space.