Relatively not so long ago, I learned about an unusual tragedy - a pilot on a military plane rammed a five-story building.
At 16 o'clock on May 16, 1972, the radio station "Free Europe" from Munich broadcast a message: "An An-26 military transport aircraft of the Baltic Fleet naval aviation fell three hours ago at a kindergarten in Svetlogorsk (Kaliningrad region).
Among the dead were children under the age of 6, educators and the aircraft crew, more than 30 people in total”.
The efficiency of the German radio station can be easily explained - on the island of Bornholm, NATO radio monitoring stations were operating, which intercepted the negotiations of our military. But the Soviet media were silent about the incident.
On May 16, 1972, at about 12:30 pm, the An-24T aircraft of the 263rd separate transport aviation regiment of the Baltic Fleet of the USSR, flying to fly around radio equipment, crashed in adverse weather conditions, catching a tree. After a collision with a tree, the damaged plane flew about 200 meters and crashed onto a kindergarten building in Svetlogorsk. The crash killed 33 people: all 8 aircraft crew members, 22 children and 3 kindergarten employees.
Photo of the deceased group of kindergarten. On the right - teacher Valentina Shabashova-Metelitsa (deceased), left - the manager Galina Klyukhina (she was not at work that day). Photo from the personal archive.
AN-24 took off from Khrabrovo at 12 hours 15 minutes. The general control of the flight was carried out by the operational duty officer of the aviation command post, Lieutenant Colonel Vaulev, who also gave permission to carry out the mission. After gaining altitude, the plane reached a point in the Zelenogradsk area, “tied” to it and went to Cape Taran. Then he made a U-turn over the sea to get to the given bearing. A dense fog was already over the sea. The plane collided with an obstacle at 14 minutes 48 seconds of flight. At the same time, black boxes recorded: the altimeter showed an altitude of 150 meters above sea level. In fact, from the foot of the steep coast to the top of the pine tree, no more than 85 meters.
The case contains a diagram of the destruction of the plane. The commander lacked a fraction of a second. Coming out of the fog, he understood everything and pulled the rudders towards himself. Alas, An-24 is not a fighter.”
Promotional video:
The diagram shows the fall of the plane up to centimeters after colliding with a pine tree on the seashore.
Diagram of the accident site, drawn up by an eyewitness Valera Rogov.
Why did the altimeter lie? It turns out that on the eve of this flight, the Navy's Air Force made, as is now clear, an ill-considered decision to replace the altimeters from the IL-14 with the AN-24. The experiments carried out subsequently showed that the altimeter, rearranged from Il-14 to An-24, gave an error of up to 60–70 meters.
One of the first to see the falling plane was a few vacationers who found themselves in the park that day, and schoolchildren whose physical education lesson was ending at the city stadium. In the next instant, the building of the kindergarten was shocked by a monstrous blow. Having lost both the planes and the landing gear during the fall, the halved fuselage rammed the second floor at high speed, burying everyone under its wreckage. Aviation fuel, flaring up from the impact with renewed vigor, in a matter of seconds, consumed all living things in its flame. Next to the flaming ruins of the kindergarten, the plane's cabin lay on the road. In it, clutching the steering wheel, sat a dead pilot. The co-pilot was lying on the road. The wind then knocked the flame off him, then fanned it with renewed vigor. Almost simultaneously, police detachments, firefighters, servicemen from neighboring military units and sailors from the Baltic Fleet arrived at the crash site.
In a matter of minutes, a triple cordon was set up. Armed soldiers, tightly clasped by the hands, barely restrained the unfortunate mothers who were rushing to where their children died in a terrible fire. Somehow we managed to push them back to a safe distance. Along the road, on a lawn blackened with soot, the military spread white sheets. Immediately, rescuers began to lay the remains of children extracted from under the ruins on them. Many, unable to bear it, closed their eyes and turned away. Someone fainted.
A state of emergency was declared in the resort town of Svetlogorsk for 24 hours. Residents were forbidden not only to leave the city, but even to leave their homes. They cut off electricity and phones. The city froze, people sat in dark apartments, as if in shelters during the war. From the evening on the coast, police squads and vigilantes were on duty: there was a fear that one of the relatives of the victims would decide to drown themselves. Work to clear the rubble and search for the bodies of the dead continued until late at night. The remains of the ruins, as it turned out later, were taken to a landfill on the outskirts of the city. For a long time, burnt children's books and toys, parts and items of military ammunition will be found in its vicinity …
As soon as the last loaded car left the city, the place where the kindergarten had stood the day before was leveled, overlaid with turf over the scorched earth. To hide the traces of the tragedy from prying eyes, it was decided to break a large flower bed in that place.
- By morning, the garden seemed to never exist - a flower bed blossomed in its place! - Andrey Dmitriev recalls. - Many parents did not believe their eyes then. The scorched earth was cut, sod was laid, paths strewn with broken red bricks. Broken and burnt trees were cut down. And only a sharp smell of kerosene. The smell lasted for another two weeks …
Garden workers Tamara Yankovskaya, Antonina Romanenko and her friend Yulia Vorona, who accidentally dropped in to visit that day, were taken to a military hospital with severe burns. In addition to their relatives, they were daily visited by KGB officers in the hospital, ready for any help in exchange for silence.
Unfortunately, Romanenko died quickly, without regaining consciousness, Yankovskaya - six months later, and Vorona survived. The deceased children and educators were buried in a mass grave at the cemetery, not far from the railway station Svetlogorsk-1. On the day of the funeral, traffic on the roads connecting the regional center with Svetlogorsk was restricted.
At the same time, diesel trains carrying passengers from Kaliningrad to the resort town were canceled. The official version is the urgent repair of the access roads, the unofficial one is to minimize the publicity of all the circumstances of the plane crash. On the day of the funeral of the dead children, more than 7,000 people gathered at the cemetery in Svetlogorsk.
No criminal case was initiated on the fact of the plane crash in Svetlogorsk. We limited ourselves only to the order of the Minister of Defense, in accordance with which about 40 military ranks were removed from their posts. And even then, the main version appeared: the pilots, in whose blood alcohol was allegedly found, were to blame. For this reason, the relatives of the deceased children and kindergarten staff forbade the pilots to be buried in the Svetlogorsk cemetery next to their victims. For the same reason, there was no place for eight names of the crew members in the general list of those killed in the plane crash in the temple-chapel.
In 1972, it was not customary to widely cover the details of accidents and disasters, especially those that happened in the military department. And the circumstances of the tragedy that took place in a small resort town on the shores of the Baltic Sea were covered with a veil of silence. Albeit with a great delay, but at last the public accusation was removed from the crew, which itself became a victim of erroneous cabinet decisions …"
In 1994, a chapel was built in the park laid out at the site of the tragedy.