Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [102]
Alexei Leonov justifies Gagarin’s desire to get himself – and others – back into the air. ‘People were asking, “Why does he have to fly?” It was because he was Deputy Chief of Training at Star City, and in order to do that, he needed to be an impeccable pilot.’ In other words, a man in the position of teaching other fliers needed to keep their respect by being a good pilot himself. Gagarin’s wife Valentina hinted at the problems he faced in a 1978 interview with Yaroslav Golovanov:
He lived through some very difficult moments when the question of whether or not he was to be allowed to fly was being decided. ‘And does he really need to fly at all?’ someone asked. But you had to know Yura – to him, not flying would have meant not living. His passion for flying was incurable. ‘Don’t be upset,’ I said, trying to calm him. ‘How can I be in charge of training others if I don’t fly myself?’ he replied, much offended.3
By March 1968 Gagarin had not flown for five months. He turned for help to Vladimir Serugin, an experienced flier and a good teacher. As a young man, Serugin had flown 140 combat missions against the Nazis. Taking into account the late collection of confirmation signatures from his superiors, his total number of sorties probably reached 200. He shot down seventeen enemy aircraft, putting himself in the ‘fighter ace’ category. By the war’s end he was just twenty-four years old, and a prime candidate for flying the best available new planes well into the 1960s.
In 1968 Serugin was in his late forties. Perhaps a little too old and too slow by then? It seems unlikely. As a test pilot he gained a reputation for pulling safely out of bad situations, or ‘coming unscrewed’ as the saying went. On March 12, 1968 he took out a newer version of the MiG, a model 21, and halted his take-off run just before he became airborne. He was convinced that something did not feel right. He taxied the plane back to the hangar and insisted that the mechanics check his engine. They found nothing wrong with it. Again Serugin took the plane to the runway, and again he turned back at the last moment. Sure enough, on closer examination the mechanics found a problem with the engine. This story suggests a flier at the peak of alertness, his instincts undimmed by early middle age.
Two weeks later, on March 27, Gagarin took off from Chkalovsky (the airbase directly alongside Star City) aboard a two-seater MiG-15UTI jet, with Serugin in the back seat acting as his instructor. The purpose of the flight was to prepare Gagarin for qualifying in a more modern MiG-17, so that he could leave the older plane behind once and for all.
Valentina was in hospital undergoing an appendectomy, and Gagarin planned to visit her later on, at the end of his day’s work.
At 7.30 in the evening, Taissia Serugina started to worry because her husband Vladimir was not yet home. As she remembers, ‘I was waiting for the whole night. I called his air regiment, and every time they said, “He’s not available, but everything’s in order. He’s busy with his work.” No one told me anything. I didn’t sleep, and I left the house next morning for work. Then they notified me that there had been a problem at the airfield, but I didn’t quite believe it. I thought if anything serious had happened to my husband, they would have told me yesterday . . . Suddenly my daughter ran up to me. “Mother!” she shouted, and there were tears in her eyes. “Father’s dead!” I don’t remember much after that.’
Alexei Leonov was one of only a few cosmonauts to have embraced helicopter flying as a worthwhile discipline. He was involved in the testing of possible lunar landing manoeuvres using adapted helicopters as crude vertical-descent simulators. On the morning of March 27,