Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [103]
The cloud base was down to 450 metres and visibility was appalling. Rain and wet snowflakes thudded against the cockpit canopy. Leonov managed to release his first parachute team into the air, but the visibility was closing in fast. The local air-traffic controllers told him that the weather was not going to improve, so he took the helicopter back to Kerzatch with half his parachute team still aboard. ‘Moments after we had landed, we heard two explosions – an explosion and a bang that accompanies a supersonic shockwave. We wondered: what was it? An explosion or a bang? I said it was probably both – that the events were somehow linked. And these two sounds were just over one second apart.’
Chkalovsky was thirteen kilometres away and the sounds were muffled by the damp weather, but even at that distance they were distinguishable. Leonov became increasingly concerned. He knew perfectly well that Gagarin was flying today. On his own authority, he flew the helicopter to Chkalovsky, despite the poor weather. All the way there he monitored the controllers calling Gagarin’s code number, 625, on the radio link. As soon as Leonov touched down at Chkalovsky, a regimental commander came up to him and said, ‘The fuel in Yuri’s plane should have run out forty-five minutes ago, but he’s not returned to the airfield.’
Leonov decided he had better report his unpleasant theory. ‘I went to the Flight Control Office and Nikolai Kamanin was there. I told him, “You might think it’s strange to say this, but I heard an explosion and a supersonic bang.” I gave an estimation of the [compass bearing] I thought the sounds had come from.’
A search helicopter was despatched to overfly the area where Gagarin’s plane had last been spotted on radar, ninety-six kilometres north-east of Moscow. The pilot flew low over the ground and discovered an area of woodland with a bare black patch of scattered earth venting some steam, but visibility was still poor and he could not be sure that this was actually a wreck site. According to Leonov, ‘The search pilot thought the steam might be a natural phenomenon of some kind. He was ordered to land his helicopter and inspect the site on foot. Because of all the trees there was no obvious opportunity to put the helicopter down, so the pilot flew to the nearest open land, near a church, and settled there.’ Apparently he waded for an hour through thick snow, a metre deep in places, to get into the woodlands where he had seen the smoke. When he had found what there was to find, he struggled back to the helicopter and made his report by radio. There was a large crater, he said, and the earth from within it had been thrown outwards across a wide area. Some of the trees at the perimeter were broken, and many small pieces of twisted metal lay all over the site. Clearly this was an aircraft accident, but there was no obvious sign of a central piece of wreckage in the crater: a fuselage, for instance, or a main engine section.
Gagarin and Serugin had lost contact with Chkalovsky traffic control at 10.31 in the morning. By the time the helicopter pilot had waded in and out of the wreck sight, made his report and called for a properly equipped rescue team, it was about 4.30 in the afternoon. The grey winter light, already poor, was fading fast. The search team arrived with powerful torches, but they were of little use in the winter darkness. By evenfall the searchers had identified what appeared to be tatters of Vladimir Serugin’s clothing, and Gagarin’s map case, but they had found no obvious trace of either man’s body, nor of the main sections of the aircraft. ‘Throughout the night two battalions of soldiers searched the forest, but they didn’t find anything,’ Leonov explains. ‘And on the next day, while we were digging