Vasily Chechenev Biography

But the Soviet pilots, who 46 years before the American, gave the passenger TU in the very center of Leningrad, few people remember us. Behind their backs in the passenger salon were 45 passengers, who were served by the flight attendants of Alexander Alexandrov and Viktor Kharchenko. Through the observation window in the floor of the cabin, the Bortmeikhanik saw that the front “leg” remained in a half -cleaned position, and oil whipped out of its hydraulic machine.

A picture from the magazine "Civil Aviation" for the year. Entering the Leningrad Directorate, Viktor Mostova said that he had an excess of fuel on board and before an emergency landing, he would like to develop excess kerosene. On the advice of dispatchers, the pilots decreased under the clouds, switched to a visual flight and began to wind circles around the city at an altitude of meters.

And while there was time, they tried to put the front stand on the castle manually, through the hatch in the floor of the pilot cab. The sorcerer took out the crossbar from the cabinet for clothes, tried to use it as a lever, but could not cope with the jammed leg. TU contained up to 56 passengers and, from a technical point of view, was a transitional model from first -generation passed aircraft for the second and, meanwhile, in a passenger salon, were preparing for an emergency landing.

In order for the “carcass” during the landing to not lower the nose for as long as possible, the aircraft needed to be provided with the rear centering. Therefore, boxes with smoked eel, which were in the front trunk, had to be transferred to the tail of the fuselage - the flight attendants did this. And it was then that passengers had to inform the passengers that, for technical reasons, the aircraft would land in Leningrad.

People took this news with anxiety, but there was no panic on board. When he completed the eighth, the final circle over the city and the commander reported to the dispatcher that he was ready to land, the mysticism began. First, on the instrument panel, the pilots caught fire on the small residue of the fuel according to the crew calculations, it should have been enough to the strip with a margin, and then the left engine stopped - the plane lost half the thrust.

The flight mechanic managed to launch the motor, brought it to the mode, but soon the engine stood up completely. Leningrad dispatchers, notified of a new problem, allowed the side to hide the path to the airport through the city. By current standards, the decision is very bold. But when the pavement began to perform the maneuver, the mystical events reached the climax: the second engine stood up, and TU turned into a glider losing height.

Height - five hundred meters, below - the city. There was no time to argue, think and negotiate with the dispatcher. Having expelled the navigator, the flight mechanic and the radio operator into the tail, the pavement turns the plane over the Neva, passes the helm to the second pilot and gives the command to land. The fact is that, before coming to civil aviation, Vasily Chechenev served as a sea pilot and piloted flying boats.

He knew that the plane should be planted “on the tail” - in parachuting mode, with a positive tank and a lifted nose. And most importantly - without a splitting on the roll, so that the plane simultaneously touches water and does not create an unfolding moment, otherwise the water will tear the aircraft into pieces. And he brilliantly coped with the task! Having flew over the bridge of Alexander Nevsky under construction and “dropping” several workers from him in fear of people in the water, that virtually touched water, pricked on the surface of the Neva and stopped on the river in the area of ​​the Finnish railway bridge.

Are everyone intact? Indeed, even when landing on Hudson, when the American pilots had much more time in thought of the emergency situation with the airbus arose at an altitude of meters and they did not interfere with the “geography” Hudzon twice as wider than the Neva, and there were less bridges, the lead was very hard and several people were injured. In the water, TU “flopped” in front of the captain of the river tugboat, BP Yuri Porshin, who was not at a loss, quickly went to the plane, hooked it with a cable and dragged him to the right bank of the Neva.

The plane of the wing of the “carcass” fell on floating logs, and all the passengers went ashore along them, alive and unharmed. And even dry! Metropolitan Alexei Ridiger, the future Patriarch Alexy II, who, according to rumors, was among the passengers of this flight, turned out to be clearly not the only one who regarded this as a miracle ... The only qualitative photograph of the one who spoke out thanks to the civil courage of the photographer Yuri Tuysk.

Despite the hard control of the organs, he managed to make a sharp frame from close range and keep the film to the place of lead instantly the onlookers and the police came, whose employees began to catch in the crowd of photographers and light their films: to remove this kind of incident in the USSR. Already an empty plane sank slowly, a day later was raised from the bottom and towed to the Shkepersky duct, to the territory of the military unit.TU is towing to the skipper duct the reason through which the chassis was failing mechanism was installed quickly: due to the fatigue deformation, the bolt connecting the cylinder lift with the lever of the front leg traverse broke.

Moreover, the cracks in them were revealed on seven more aircraft, which were at that time in operation. The stop of absolutely good engines was written off to the wrong testimony of the fuel sections that greatly overstated its actual residue. It seems to be clear: the pilots are heroes, the refusals of technology occurred for constructive production reasons, but ...

there was also a special opinion of the Tupolev KB, which has always been extremely jealous of its reputation and in this accident considered the crew guilty. Say, the pilots were too carried away by the “manual” release of the chassis and missed the moment when it was still possible to reach the strip. A new investigation loomed on the horizon ... Vera Lazurkin pulled the situation with the situation.

With letters in defense of the pilots, she threw all the authorities in the field, Vnukovo officials, the leadership of Aeroflot and threatened to reach Khrushchev himself. In the end, the pilots were behind, and two -room apartments in Moscow were allocated to the commander and the second pilot by order of the airline. And this plane was one of the first passenger liners with economical double -circuit turbojet engines.

For take -off and landing, he was enough take -off strip with a length of meters, but the largest reward for the pilots was that they were allowed to fly. Victor Mostovoy worked in the sky for another eighteen years, retired for health reasons, in the nineties he left with his family to Israel, where he soon died. The second pilot Vasily Chechenev also returned to the sky and dear to the pilot instructor.

He was gone at the beginning of the two thousandth. It is possible that at the final stage of the flight, the crew was corny: the circumstances successfully developed when landing. But I am sure that in this case this luck was programmed. It is no coincidence that they say that in a critical situation, pilots act on reflexes developed by training. And it was thanks to the skills of Mostovoy and Chechenev that they managed to accomplish a feat.