An experimental aircraft "104" developed by the Tupolev Design Bureau first took to the air on June 17, 1955 from the airfield near Moscow in Zhukovsky. Thus began factory testing of the machine, which by the autumn of that year had turned into a jet airliner TU-104 - the third in the world, the second put into operation and the first in the USSR.
Tu-104
When creating the first Soviet jet liner, the Tupolev Design Bureau took the TU-16 bomber as a basis (the 104 aircraft even at one time bore the TU-16P index - “passenger”) in order to reduce resources and time for general design development. Thus, the task of training flight personnel was also facilitated, and they also saved on ground maintenance and repair equipment.
Tu-16
As one of the arguments in favor of creating such an aircraft, Alexei Tupolev cited the possibility of flying at high altitude, “above the weather”, while the propeller passenger aviation, which had a small ceiling, suffered mercilessly from chatter. But it was there that a new, as yet unknown danger awaited the first jet liner.
Over the entire history of operation, 37 cars suffered serious accidents - 18% of the total number of vehicles produced. At the same time, it should be noted that the 104th behaved more decently in flight than its English competitor Comet of the De Havilland company (23% of the lost cars), which had an unhealthy habit of falling apart in the air due to fatigue loads in a careless designed fuselage.
The first regular flight of the TU-104 was made on September 15, 1956. Aeroflot crew on a plane with tail number SSSR-L5438 performed the first flight from Moscow to New York on a route passing through London, Keflavik and Goose Bay. The liner stayed in the air for 13 hours and 29 minutes. And on September 15, 1956, the regular operation of jet engines began on the Moscow-Khabarovsk flight TU-104 with tail number USSR-L5413.
But from the very beginning of the flights on the new liner, the pilots were in for an unpleasant surprise. In the course of further operation during the flight, for no apparent reason, the TU-104 sometimes unexpectedly tossed up, after which it lost control, fell into a tailspin and began diving. Pilots called this effect "pickup". After the "catch" made itself felt, the best scientists and testers were involved in the study of this phenomenon. Several institutes dealt only with this problem.
Harold Kuznetsov participated in these tests as a test pilot for Aeroflot. He constantly argued with his superiors, arguing that the car did not have enough elevator to take the car out of a dive. On Tupolev, he believed that the "pickup" had other reasons, ignoring the opinion of a civilian pilot. Meanwhile, the prestige of the country was at stake.
Harold Kuznetsov
Khrushchev liked the TU-104 so much that he decided to make his visit to the UK in 1956 on it. But because of the above problems, he was hardly able to be dissuaded from this. The Soviet delegation went to London on a cruiser. But in order to prove Soviet technological superiority (the TU-104 competitor, the British Comet, did not fly due to a series of mysterious accidents), Khrushchev ordered the TU-104 to be brought to London.
The arrival of the Soviet airliner, according to the British press, had an effect comparable to the landing of a UFO. The next day, a second TU-104 flew to London, with a different number. A report appeared in the British newspapers that it was the same aircraft, and the "Russian priests" were "repainting the numbers on their experimental aircraft." "Russian priests" are Russian pilots dressed in all black. The chief designer Alexei Tupolev was offended, and, firstly, he ordered the pilots to allocate funds to dress in something fashionable and not black, and the next day - on March 25, 1956, send three TU-104s to London at once, which was fulfilled. It was a triumph - after all, at that time no other country in the world had operating jet passenger airliners. After the return of the liners from London to Moscow, Tupolev personally greeted the crews.
Two years later, Harold Kuznetsov represented the TU-104 in Belgium, and after returning from Brussels, he was arrested by KGB agents. The reason for his arrest was a ridiculous case. Before flying to Brussels, the TU-104 was shown to the country's leadership. Kuznetsov turned the plane around while taxiing, and Politburo member Shepilov's hat was blown off. Organizational conclusions followed immediately - it was decided to punish the commander after returning from the exhibition. As a result, Kuznetsov was removed from his post and appointed co-pilot for a period of six months. During this time, he was engaged in test work at Aeroflot.
In October 1958, Kuznetsov returned to work as a line pilot on the TU-104. He became commander again. By this time he was 35 years old, he raised his daughter alone. Harold had many friends who called him "The Musketeer". In 1957, a new flight attendant, Alla Maklakova, appeared in Harold's crew.
And this is the conductor Alla Maklakova. Harold is divorced and has a daughter by himself. Everyone knows that he is in love with Alla. Therefore, they often fly in the same crew ...
Meanwhile, the problem with the tossing of the TU-104 aircraft has not gone away. Despite all the efforts of the designers and testers, the problem of the liner with the "pickup" was not solved. The first alarm signal was sounded by a flight accident on May 16, 1958, when the Czechoslovakian TU-104, following at an altitude of 12,000 meters, fell into a zone of thunderstorm activity. Almost immediately, both engines shut down. The plane began to fall, and only at an altitude of 4000 meters the crew was able to subdue the car, start one engine and land at a military airfield near Prague.
A month later, on June 22, the TU-104A, en route from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk at an altitude of 12,500 meters, hit a powerful updraft of air and ended up at an altitude of 13,500 meters, from where it began to randomly fall to a height of 11,500 meters. After the "stall" and loss of altitude, the crew commander, pilot Polbin, managed to bring the plane into level flight. Two prerequisites, it seemed, should have made both the leaders of Aeroflot and the leaders of aviation industry. But that did not happen.
Unfortunately, we didn't have to wait long. The first disaster occurred in the area of Birobidzhan. In August 1958, the TU-104A, flying Khabarovsk-Irkutsk, at an altitude of 10,800 meters in perfectly clear weather, was thrown by an ascending gust of air to a height of 12,000 meters. The commander of the ship, pilot Bykov, could not only cope with the "rebellious" machine, but also convey to the ground about what had happened. A month later, pilot Zhelbakov's plane was thrown from a height of 9,000 meters to 11,500 meters.
Two months later another disaster struck. He was not supposed to fly to Beijing, the plan included the name of another pilot - Anatoly Gorbachev. But Kuznetsova himself asked a friend for a replacement, and Gorbachev did not want to refuse a friend.
October 17, 1958 Tu-104 with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of Harold Kuznetsov, was flying Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. In the cabin were mainly Foreign citizens- A delegation of Chinese and North Korean party functionaries.
The weather in Moscow was bad, at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after flying over Kazan, the controller ordered to turn around and proceed to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "pickup" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane, as it were, "raised on its hind legs", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on its wing and went into a tailspin.
The crew did not understand what was happening. However, there was no time for guesswork. Commander Harold Kuznetsov knew only one thing for sure - it was necessary to level the car at all costs. Together with the co-pilot Anton Artemov, they gave the helm away from them all the way, but nothing worked. They lacked elevators.
After the plane was suddenly thrown up, it just as suddenly turned over on its back and began to go into a tailspin. The devices are out of order. It was impossible to understand where the earth is and where the sky is. There was weightlessness in the cabin. Not obeying the rudders, the TU-104 instantly went into an uncontrolled dive. Almost vertically, developing supersonic speed, the liner rushed to the ground. At the end of this dive, "TU" literally demolished several telegraph poles along the railway track. The impact broke the fuselage in half. The remains of the crew and passengers were subsequently found by rescuers within a radius of almost two kilometers.
As the state commission later established, the fall lasted two minutes. But already from a height of thirteen kilometers, Kuznetsov began to scrupulously transmit to the ground what was happening with the machine. I transmitted it myself: on the steering wheel of the TU-104 there was a special button connected to a microphone. Radio operator Alexander Fedorov duplicated these messages. Communication continued almost until the collision with the ground. The last words of the commander were: “Farewell, dear. We're dying."
The plane crashed in the Vurnar region of Chuvashia. 71 passengers and 9 crew members were killed.
The information transmitted from the board in distress turned out to be truly invaluable. Prior to this, none of the carefully conducted investigations, in which specialists from the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, the State Research Institute, the Tupolev Design Bureau, Air Force, and failed to shed light on the causes of the mysterious accidents TU-104. Everything was attributed to the so-called "human factor". At one debriefing, after listening to the complaints of the flight crew about the behavior of the machine, the offended Tupolev threw in his hearts: “This is not a bad plane, you don’t know how to fly it!”.
Harold Kuznetsov dotted the i's. As the analysis of the information received thanks to him showed, the plane fell into a giant ascending air stream. The fact that this is possible at such sky-high, over nine kilometers, heights, none of the creators of the new aircraft and did not suspect. After all, piston machines "ceilings" were disproportionately smaller. And so the designers argued: jet machines will fly "above the weather."
That was before that tragic evening. The crew of Harold Kuznetsov was doubly unlucky. Not only did he fall into a vertical air stream, he ended up at its very epicenter. After performing several simulation flights, the specialists were able to determine the parameters of this flow. Its length was 9-13 kilometers, width - almost 2, thickness up to 6 ... The speed was also huge - 300 kilometers per hour.
As a matter of urgency, the designers began to look for ways to deal with the formidable natural phenomenon. The "ceilings" were lowered, the design was modernized, recommendations for centering were developed aircraft. Bitter experience helped create other aerodynamic forms that successfully resist air currents. In particular, the designers of the new intercontinental airliner IL-b2 came up with a special "tooth" on the leading edge of the aircraft's swept wing. Thanks to him, even having fallen into a powerful vertical stream, "IL" independently lowered its nose.
After that, the TU-104 aircraft carried passengers for another three decades, and although there were some catastrophes (after all, about 200 aircraft were built and flew), their reasons were already different. For a long time, the TU-104 became the main passenger aircraft of Aeroflot: for example, in 1960, a third of passenger air transportation in the USSR was carried out on the TU-104. Over 23 years of operation, the TU-104 aircraft fleet has carried about 100 million passengers, having spent 2,000,000 flight hours in the air and performing more than 600,000 flights.
Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeny Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight engineer
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatyana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant
Worthy life. A well-deserved death... And many lives saved in the future.
Tu-104 - the world's second jet passenger liner, and the first to stand the test of many years of operation. The British Comet, ahead of it by several years, after several disasters caused by design flaws, went down in history. The Tu-104, on the other hand, was destined for a long flight life - for more than 20 years these aircraft carried passengers along the air lines of the USSR and other countries.
Tu-104
The design of the Tu-104 began in the spring of 1954, based on the already created Tu-16 strategic bomber. This greatly facilitated the work, and already in September 1954, the preliminary design of the Tu-104 was presented to the Air Force.
During the creation of the Tu-104, special attention was paid to ensuring the high reliability of the aircraft structure, as well as increasing the life of the airframe and especially the pressurized cabin. Mindful of the problems that the British faced with the Kometa, during the implementation of the Tu-104 development program, its airframe was subjected for the first time in domestic practice to cyclic tests in a new specially built TsAGI hydro pool. These tests made it possible to identify weaknesses in the design, carry out improvements and ensure its necessary durability.
The experimental Tu-104 made its first flight on June 17, 1955, and mass production began at the end of the year. The pioneer in the development of the Tu-104 in the civil air fleet was the aviation division of jet aircraft specially organized at the capital's Vnukovo airport. It was also the first training unit in which the crews of other airlines were retrained for new jet technology.
On September 15, 1956, the Tu-104 made its first regular flight with passengers along the Moscow-Irkutsk route, the aircraft was piloted by the crew headed by the commander of the ship E.P. Barabash. On October 12, the first regular international flight to Prague - the commander of the ship B.P. Bugaev (the future chief pilot L.I. Brezhnev, and then the head of the Soviet Civil Air Fleet). Regular operation of the aircraft began, which opened a new era not only in the development of domestic civil aviation, but also spurred the development of global jet passenger aviation. The Tu-104 became the world's first jet passenger aircraft successfully mastered in the Civil Air Fleet, it was behind it that the Boeing 707, the Comet-4, and the French Caravel entered the civil aviation system. Jet passenger aviation has become a reality available to the widest range of passengers in many countries.
But in the history of the Tu-104, not everything was cloudless. Less than two years after the start of operation, the first loss occurred - on February 19, 1958, the USSR-L5414 board, leaving Moscow closed by clouds to an alternate airfield, fell during landing due to an incorrect calculation of the amount of fuel. This is a typical example of the “human factor”, but on August 15 of the same year, the Tu-104A USSR-L5442, which was flying Khabarovsk-Irkutsk-Moscow, crashed for unknown reasons in the Birobidzhan area. Something happened at cruising flight level (about 10,000 meters) and the car lost altitude in a matter of minutes and crashed in the taiga. In those years, there were no flight recorders - "black boxes" yet, and it was not possible to establish the causes of the disaster.
The design of the Tu-104 contained a fatal error, which Tupolev Design Bureau and specialized research institutes have been unsuccessfully trying to find for several months. Test flights were carried out in different modes - no serious problems were identified. At the same time, dozens of Tu-104s continued to carry passengers.
On October 17, 1958, the new Tu-104A with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of the most experienced pilot Harold Kuznetsov, was flying Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. In the cabin were mostly foreign citizens - a delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists.
The weather in Moscow was bad, at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after flying over Kazan, the controller ordered to turn around and proceed to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "pickup" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane, as it were, "raised on its hind legs", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on its wing and went into a tailspin.
In the situation that arose, the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft. But the lack of elevator travel did not allow the car to be taken out of lethal mode. Harold Kuznetsov, knowing that the Birobidzhan story might be repeating itself, ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground. He conveyed only a few words - “pick up”, “the stabilizer is not enough”, “we are dying, tell the relatives”. The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky district of Chuvashia, a few tens of meters from the canvas railway Moscow-Kazan-Sverdlovsk, near the village of Bulatovo. 65 passengers and 9 crew members died.
Now only the old inhabitants of the surrounding villages can indicate this place - there is neither a monument nor a cross on it. The plate installed by the author is unlikely to live for a long time.
Birches at the crash site. View from Apnerka.
Monument to Harold Kuznetsov at the Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow.
The information transmitted by the crew was enough to find and fix the problem. The rules for centering the aircraft were changed, the angle of installation of the stabilizer was changed and the elevator was finalized. The maximum flight altitude has also been reduced. The tendency of the aircraft to "pick up" has been greatly reduced.
After that, the Tu-104 carried passengers for another three decades, and although there were some catastrophes (after all, about 200 aircraft were built and flew), their reasons were already different. The Tu-104 became for a long time the main passenger aircraft of Aeroflot: for example, in 1960, a third of passenger air transportation in the USSR was carried out on the Tu-104. Over 23 years of operation, the Tu-104 aircraft fleet has carried about 100 million passengers, spent 2,000,000 flight hours in the air and completed more than 600,000 flights.
Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeny Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight engineer
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatyana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant
The materials of the website of the ASTC named after Tupolev were used in the text.
The shortcomings of the Tu-104 design led to a terrible catastrophe on October 17, 1958. Thanks to the clear actions of the crew commander, who until the last commented on everything that happened, more such tragedies with this model of the "carcass" did not happen.
Exactly 56 years ago, on October 17, 1958, a Soviet Aeroflot Tu-104 aircraft crashed 22 km from the city of Kanash in the Chuvash Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. On board the plane was a delegation of Chinese and North Korean Komsomol activists. All 80 people on board were killed. An interesting fact: it was in the 50s that the people “walked” a song to the tune of the funeral march “Tu-104 is the best aircraft”. The board, following the Beijing-Moscow flight, has already passed most of the way. The crew commander was Harold Kuznetsov. Due to fog in Moscow, the plane was denied landing. At the Gorky alternate airfield, the weather also did not allow landing. After flying over Kazan, the dispatcher ordered to turn around and proceed to the Sverdlovsk airport suitable for landing. At about 21:00 the plane passes Omsk. At an altitude of 10 thousand meters, the crew began a U-turn towards the alternate airfield in Sverdlovsk. Suddenly, the plane was thrown up as if from a strong blow. The car quickly gained altitude, then rolled over on its back and began a sharp dive. The instruments almost immediately failed, it was impossible to understand where the earth is and where the sky is. The crew and passengers were doomed, and perhaps they already guessed it. It is said that at such moments a person's whole life flashes before his eyes.
Causes of the disaster
It should be noted that the plane was brand new. The year of its release coincided with the year of the disaster. The very first flight of a Soviet jet passenger airliner took place a year earlier - in June 1955. Tu-104 then became a kind of national brand. People wanted to fly on it. Can we say that there were flaws in the design of the aircraft? One thing is clear for sure: thanks to the latest reports from the crew commander from the airliner in distress, changes were made to it, and in the future there were no cases similar to this disaster with Tu-104 aircraft. On that ill-fated day, the Tu-104 fell into a powerful ascending turbulent flow. At an altitude of about 13 thousand meters, he lost speed and went into an almost vertical dive. Then there was a "catch". The plane, as it were, “raised up”, went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on its wing and went into a tailspin. It was established that the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft, but the lack of elevator travel did not allow the aircraft to take level flight. Even when it became clear that the plane was doomed, Harold Kuznetsov continued without panic, clearly commenting on everything that was happening and ordered the radio operator to broadcast his words to the ground. By the way, he wasn't supposed to be on that flight. Kuznetsov asked his friend Andrei Gorbachev to swap with him. He agreed. “This is pure mysticism,” commented the daughter of Harold Kuznetsov for the film “The Last Words of Pilot Kuznetsov”. He always knew he wouldn't live long. He said, "I will soon die, and you will live long." At 21:30, the last message was received from the crashing plane: “The end. Farewell. Tell your family…” Tatyana Matyanina
Harold Dmitrievich Kuznetsov
In 1958, the photojournalist of the American magazine LIFE Howard Sochurek, making a trip to the USSR, took a series of photographs of the crew of the Tu-104 aircraft. Surely he was allowed to photograph the best, "reliable" crew.
Interesting, with the flavor of the era, photos:
The Tu-104 aircraft is the pride of the USSR. Preparing for departure.
And this is the Tu-104 crew. The crew commander is Harold Kuznetsov. Second on the right. Tall, handsome, lucky. To become the commander of the flagship of Aeroflot at the age of 35, to fly on international lines - it was a brilliant career! Next to him is the conductor Alla. They'll be dead in less than a month...
G. Kuznetsov in the cockpit
Let's smoke! Good photo...
For some reason, the porter goes right behind the commander ....
And this is the conductor Alla Maklakova. Harold is divorced and has a daughter by himself. Everyone knows that he is in love with Alla. Therefore, they often fly in the same crew ...
Prophetic photo. They go for a flight. Less than a month left...
October 17, 1958 (55 years ago!) Tu-104 with tail number CCCP-42362, operated by the crew of Harold Kuznetsov, was flying Beijing-Omsk-Moscow. In the cabin were mostly foreign citizens - a delegation of Chinese and North Korean party functionaries.
The weather in Moscow was bad, at the Gorky alternate airfield, too, and after flying over Kazan, the controller ordered to turn around and proceed to Sverdlovsk, suitable for landing. During a turn at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the aircraft most likely got into a zone of strong turbulence and a "pickup" occurred - a spontaneous increase in the pitch angle uncontrolled by the crew. The plane, as it were, "raised on its hind legs", went up from the echelon, gaining an additional two kilometers of altitude, lost speed, fell on its wing and went into a tailspin.
In the situation that arose, the crew did everything possible to save the aircraft. But the lack of elevator travel did not allow the car to be taken out of lethal mode. Harold Kuznetsov knew that the situation that led to a number of Tu-104 crashes could be repeated, and the causes of which were not found. He delivered just a few words - “pickup”, “the stabilizer is not enough”, “we are dying, tell the relatives”. The plane crashed in the Vurnarsky district of Chuvashia, a few dozen meters from the Moscow-Kazan-Sverdlovsk railway track, not far from the village of Bulatovo. All 65 passengers and 9 crew members died.
Information from the board in distress proved invaluable. The fact is that during the years 1956-1958, several mysterious incidents had already occurred with Tu-104 aircraft. None of the carefully conducted investigations, in which the specialists of the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet, the State Research Institute, the Tupolev Design Bureau, the Air Force, were involved, failed to shed light on their causes. Defects in the design, technical problems? No, everything seems to be fine. Bad weather? And you can't fault them. There remains the so-called human factor. And the bumps rained down on the heads of the pilots.
The transferred information was enough to find and fix the problem. The rules for centering the aircraft were changed, the angle of installation of the stabilizer was changed and the elevator was finalized. The maximum flight altitude has also been reduced. The tendency of the aircraft to "pick up" has been greatly reduced.
After that, the Tu-104 carried passengers for another three decades, and although there were some catastrophes (after all, about 200 aircraft were built and flew), their reasons were already different.
Much credit for this belongs to Harold Kuznetsov and his crew. Here are their names:
Kuznetsov Harold Dmitrievich - FAC instructor
Artemov Anton Filimonovich - FAC
Rogozin Igor Alexandrovich - co-pilot
Mumrienko Evgeny Andreevich - navigator
Veselov Ivan Vladimirovich - flight engineer
Fedorov Alexander Sergeevich - radio operator
Smolenskaya Maya Filippovna - flight attendant-translator
Goryushina Tatyana Borisovna - flight attendant
Maklakova Albina - flight attendant
Worthy life. A well-deserved death...
And many lives saved in the future.
Alla Maklakova is buried nearby...
