Featured Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Topics: Travel, World News, History, Russia
Britt Jones
Traveling by plane is meant to be one of the safest forms of transport, but over 80 passengers faced a horrifying situation after a pilot made a deadly bet.
There have been several largely known plane crashes that have happened in the last couple of decades, but none of them involved a pilot making a bet without their passengers’ lives in mind.
Sadly, this is something that happened at the Kurumoch Airport in Samara, Russia - formerly known as Kuybyshev during Soviet rule.
It was on October 20, 1986, that the Tu-134A flight left its station at the Koltsovo Airport in Yekaterinburg, which was heading for Grozny.
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With a planned stopover at Samara, the flight would have only taken two hours and 30 minutes before passengers would then board the second flight to their planned destination.
With 87 passengers on board and seven crew members, Aeroflot Flight 6502 was traveling as planned to Samara, where pilot in command Alexander Kliuyev, co-pilot Gennady Zhirnov, navigating officer Ivan Mokhonko, flight engineer Kyuri Khamzatov, and three flight attendants were all on board to ensure its safety.
But something went very wrong inside of the cockpit which left 70 people dead and 24 traumatized by the experience.
As it turned out, Captain Kliuyev believed that he could pull off a stunt like no other, which would see him navigate the passenger plane without looking out of the window or using vital navigation screens.
While approaching Kurumoch Airport, he decided to make a bet with First Officer Zhirnov and stated that he could pull off an instrument-only approach. This would mean that all of the windows in the cockpit would have the curtains pulled down, leaving him completely unable to see the ground, and he’d only have to rely on the very basic navigation tools inside of the cockpit as support.
While some may think that this is something normal in the piloting world to consider doing, it’s actually completely mad, and is not something that would be pulled off successfully (unless it’s a miracle).
Unfortunately, the captain still went ahead with his reckless plan after it was accepted by his other pilot, and made several blunders as he traveled his path.
Not only had he ignored the ground-proximity warning at an altitude of 62–65 metres, he also dismissed a suggested go-around alert which would have allowed him to correct his trajectory.
This would prove to be fatal mistakes.
When the aircraft touched down on the runway, it was traveling at a speed of 150 knots (170 mph) and overran the runway, leading to the plane traveling off the runway and onto the terrain.
The hard landing caused damage to the plane, flipping it upside down before it was able to come to a complete halt belly up. Due to the speed, flip and awful bet made, 63 people died at the scene and seven more died later in hospital.
Thankfully, all 14 children on board lived, but they had to live with the trauma of the plane accident forever.
First Commander Zhirnov, who agreed to the insane bet, died while trying to save the lives of his passengers as he went into cardiac arrest while on the way to the hospital.
Captain Kliuyev, however, left the plane unscathed after being responsible for the deaths of most of his passengers and some of his crew.
Subsequently, he was prosecuted and sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was then reduced to six years served.
The instrument-only approach was the worst plane crash for Aeroflot, as there was another crash caused by a pilot letting his 15-year old son steer the plane in 1994, killing 75.