On 7 February 1981, a Tupolev Tu-104A passenger jet crashed during take off from Pushkin Airport near

Leningrad Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

, Soviet Union, resulting in the death of all 50 people on board, including 28 high-ranking Soviet military personnel. The official investigation concluded that the aircraft was improperly loaded.

Accident

At 18:00 local time, the Tu-104A lined up on runway 21 and commenced its take-off run during snowing weather conditions. After

rotation Rotation or rotational/rotary motion is the circular movement of an object around a central line, known as an ''axis of rotation''. A plane figure can rotate in either a clockwise or counterclockwise sense around a perpendicular axis intersect ...

, the aircraft pitched up beyond normal take-off

attitude Attitude or Attitude may refer to: Philosophy and psychology * Attitude (psychology), a disposition or state of mind ** Attitude change * Propositional attitude, a mental state held towards a proposition Science and technology * Orientation ...

, and eight seconds after lift off, at an

altitude Altitude is a distance measurement, usually in the vertical or "up" direction, between a reference datum (geodesy), datum and a point or object. The exact definition and reference datum varies according to the context (e.g., aviation, geometr ...

above ground level of , the Tupolev stalled and entered a right bank. The aircraft continued to roll right until it struck the ground from the departure end of the runway, crashing nearly inverted and bursting into flames, killing 49 of the 50 people on board. One person in the cockpit was ejected from the

nose A nose is a sensory organ and respiratory structure in vertebrates. It consists of a nasal cavity inside the head, and an external nose on the face. The external nose houses the nostrils, or nares, a pair of tubes providing airflow through the ...

of the aircraft, and was found alive in the snow not far from the crash site, but died on the way to a hospital.

Aircraft

The Tupolev Tu-104A involved was initially registered as СССР-Л5426 (Cyrillic, usually rendered as CCCP-L5426 in English-language publications); construction was completed on 26 July 1957. The aircraft was sent to Aeroflot's Far East division. In 1959 it was re-registered to CCCP-42332 and continued flying with Aeroflot until 6 October 1961, when it was transferred to the Soviet Navy.

Investigation

The investigation of the accident revealed that the crew allowed the aircraft to be improperly loaded. Evidence was uncovered that led investigators to believe that some military officers did not comply with seating assignments given by the crew and that these officers pressured the crew to make the flight in an unsafely loaded aircraft. Another factor reported by witnesses was that large rolls of printing paper were loaded on board, and these are believed to have rolled rearward during acceleration on take-off, causing the

center of gravity In physics, the center of mass of a distribution of mass in space (sometimes referred to as the barycenter or balance point) is the unique point at any given time where the weighted relative position of the distributed mass sums to zero. For ...

to shift aft of acceptable limits, thereby reducing the stability of the aircraft in pitch, making lowering the nose impossible for the crew, and the crash inevitable.

Casualties

The Tupolev Tu-104A was carrying many of the Pacific Fleet's senior officers from Leningrad, where they had been attending meetings with the naval command, to

Vladivostok Vladivostok ( ; , ) is the largest city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai and the capital of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia. It is located around the Zolotoy Rog, Golden Horn Bay on the Sea of Japan, covering an area o ...

, via

Khabarovsk Khabarovsk ( ) is the largest city and the administrative centre of Khabarovsk Krai, Russia,Law #109 located from the China–Russia border, at the confluence of the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, about north of Vladivostok. As of the 2021 Russian c ...

. Among the dead were 16 admirals and generals, including the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Emil Spiridonov, and his wife. They were both interred with most of the other victims of the crash in the

Serafimovskoe Cemetery Serafimovskoe Cemetery () is a historic cemetery in northwestern Saint Petersburg, in Primorsky District, Saint Petersburg, Primorsky District. It was established to meet the need for the growing population in the early twentieth century. The fi ...

in Leningrad, where a memorial to the dead was erected on the orders of the Navy's commander-in-chief,

Sergey Gorshkov Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov (; 26 February 1910 – 13 May 1988) was an admiral of the fleet of the Soviet Union. Twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, he oversaw the expansion of the Soviet Navy into a global force during the Cold ...

. A memorial service is held annually on 7 February at the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in St Petersburg, and on the 20th anniversary of the crash, the line: "Those who died in the line of duty on 7 February 1981", and an

Orthodox cross The Russian Orthodox Cross (or just the Orthodox Cross by some Russian Orthodox traditions) is a variation of the Christian cross since the 16th century in Russia, although it bears some similarity to a cross with a bottom crossbeam slanted the ...

were added to the memorial

stele A stele ( ) or stela ( )The plural in English is sometimes stelai ( ) based on direct transliteration of the Greek, sometimes stelae or stelæ ( ) based on the inflection of Greek nouns in Latin, and sometimes anglicized to steles ( ) or stela ...

commemorating the Pacific Navy sailors.

References

{{Aviation accidents and incidents in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s Aviation accidents and incidents in 1981 Accidents and incidents involving the Tupolev Tu-104 Aviation accidents and incidents in the Soviet Union 20th-century aviation accidents and incidents in Russia February 1981 in the Soviet Union 1981 in Russia Soviet Navy 1981 disasters in the Soviet Union

External links