First one of the passenger planes disappeared from the radar screen, then the same thing happened to the other. The control center almost immediately received a report from an eyewitness, “Something is falling from the sky…!”
On August 11, 1979, two Tu-134 passenger planes collided in the sky over the Ukrainian city of Dniprodzerzhinsk.
They were flying at 800 km/h and by an unfortunate coincidence did not see each other in the dense clouds at an altitude of 9,000 km. One collided with the other at right angles, instantly ripping through the cockpit. The planes flipped over, pecking each other in the rear: the first disintegrated in midair, the second on the ground after Piquet’s tragic impact. The wreckage of the planes and the bodies of the 178 dead were scattered over an area of 48 square kilometers.
The passenger planes belonged to the Moldovan and Belarusian civil aviation. The first was flying from Chelyabinsk to Chisinau. The second flew from Tashkent to Minsk, carrying the Uzbek soccer team Pakhtakor and ordinary passengers. Air traffic controllers in Kharkiv are responsible for the accident. They miscalculated the time of the intersection of the two routes. When they realized this, they tried to correct the error and ordered the Belarusian plane to move to a higher level. However, this command was not executed by the TU-134, but by an IL-62 flying nearby. The response of the IL-62 pilot was received as that of the TU-134. The approach of a thunderstorm caused severe radio interference to disrupt the reception of the message to the two controllers, condemning the passengers of both planes to death. In turn, the controllers were sentenced to 15 years in prison. Only one of them served the sentence. The other pilot hanged himself in his cell at the beginning of his sentence.
Because of the deaths of the Pakhtakor club players, the tragedy reverberated throughout the USSR. The team was at the height of its popularity and was flying to Minsk for its next match. However, no investigation was launched. Twenty years later, Judge Leonid Tchaikovsky, who presided over the case, admitted: the pilot of the Belarusian plane was to blame. The “black box” recordings showed that the crew was celebrating the presence of famous soccer players in the flight. They were all drunk and the controller’s command was ignored. “However, the main culprit in these accidents is always the air traffic controller,” – notes Victor Nitka, CEO of Avintel Aviation Alliance:
“The collision warning system at the time was flawed and did not warn pilots of an approaching aircraft. In addition, the equipment in air traffic control centers at the time did not allow more accurate observation of aircraft, so air traffic controllers could not correctly determine the height of the aircraft. In any case, the pilot must follow the controller’s instructions. These are the rules.” Failure to do so could result in a tragedy, as happened that day.
