The day the USSR lost 16 admirals and the entire Pacific Fleet Command, in one simply-avoided disaster

[onetrack]

Below is a fascinating story of a Tupolev TU-104 crash at Pushkin in 1981, that decimated the USSR's Pacific Fleet Command and leadership.

 

The Communists lost 16 Admirals and many other high-ranking officers amongst the 50 people killed, in a takeoff crash that was unsurvivable.

 

And when you find out that the simple cause of the crash was the complete and total greed of the Admirals involved, you gain some understanding of the dysfunctional state of the USSR at that time.

 

What is even more startling is that the Communists initially believed the crash could only have been an act of sabotage by the West, such was their inability to understand that their whole military and governmental systems were seriously flawed.

 

Probably even more concerning is that the crash records and investigation were classified, and kept from any public records - and even the relatives of the deceased - for nearly 20 years.

 

 

 

[turboplanner]

It almost seems like someone said to the writer "Write it again, but this time use 8 times the words, but an amazing insight into the day to day life of the USSR in those times."

 

The US lost some of their best scientists and engineers three times by the simple decision to fly them all out from the east to Area 51 near Las Vegas at the end of the weekend.

 

By the 1960s it was corporate policy that executives could not fly in single engine aircraft, and there was an upper limit of people who could fly together. That intensified after the top performers in a sales competition conducted by Thermo King in the US, who had won a national competition for a free trip to Japan, all died in a crash on Mount Fuji.

 

The USAF 747 freight aircraft was destroyed in a similar crash on takeoff from Bagram Airport with a load of military vehicles which slid back as the plane lifted off.

It wouldn't surprise me if incorrect truck pintle hook specifications were the cause of that one.

 

 

[onetrack]

I recall numerous other air disasters where pompous military leaders insisted on flight or landings against aircrew advice, which lead to those individuals being wiped out.

 

The Smolensk air disaster come to mind, whereby the C-i-C of the Polish Air Force is reported as pressuring the aircrew to land in poor conditions - and the death of Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory in 1944, who insisted that his flight to Ceylon take place in seriously adverse weather, against the pilots advice - which flight resulted in their aircraft doing a CFIT into the French Alps, with no survivors.

 

I was under the impression from the reports I read that the Bagram crash was due to a deficiency in the number and type of tiedowns for the armoured vehicles they were restraining.

The NTSB report states the main reason for the crash as, "inadequate procedures for restraining special cargo loads, which resulted in the loadmaster's improper restraint of the cargo".

 

It's all too obvious the training received by the loadmasters in both the Pushkin and Bagram crashes was completely inadequate. The Tupolev just might have got off the ground overloaded, but the two 500kg rolls of newsprint rolling backwards on takeoff, sealed its fate irrevocably. There have been numerous air disasters caused by improper loading techniques, and one would think the loading systems would have been set in stone, long ago.

 

Edited October 3, 2021 by onetrack