On November 6, 1967, an Il-18 plane crashed in Sverdlovsk. All who were on board were killed – 107 people. How did the tragedy happen, which was not written about in the press, and how did they try to find its cause?
On that day, an experienced pilot of the first class, the captain of the aircraft, Yuri Abaturov, was to fly on the new popular route Leningrad – Sverdlovsk – Tashkent. The load was full – as always on this flight. At ten o’clock in the evening, the Il-18 took off at Koltsovo airport to continue the flight to Uzbekistan. Thirty seconds later, the plane banked sharply, hit the hill behind the Siberian tract with its wing and crashed to the ground, writes KP.Ru.
The airport was closed for flights until the morning. Rescuers, police, firefighters worked at the crash site. But the impact on the ground was such a terrible force that many of them tore off their clothes, recalled Viktor Lomkov, a driver from the Ural Civil Aviation Administration, who was at the scene of the emergency. There was no one to help.
On the morning after the catastrophe, a commission arrived from Moscow, which was supposed to establish the cause of the fall: there were no “black boxes” then. It was necessary to figure it out empirically – to try to repeat the fatal takeoff on another Il-18. The commission was headed by Deputy Minister of Aviation Alexander Bykov. It also included workers from the aircraft manufacturer and test pilots. One of the latter made a dangerous roll, about 40 degrees, but the plane remained in the air even after that. During the tests, the trajectory of the Il-18 was repeated as accurately as possible, but it was not possible to understand the cause of the fall.
There are several versions left. According to one of them, the demobels who were returning home by plane accidentally blew up a smoke bomb, which they took as a souvenir in memory of the army. According to another version, the equipment on the plane was out of order. Perhaps the reason was the engine, which had flown 40 hours. And, perhaps, the automation did not work.
The dead passengers were buried at the Siberian cemetery. Crew members – at the cemetery in Koltsovo. After 30 years, a monument to the victims of the tragedy was erected here.
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