Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [106]
Alexei Leonov was a member of the crash investigation team. As he points out, ‘The plane was not in a dive when it hit the ground, but coming out of it. The plane didn’t crash nose-first, but almost flat on its belly.’ Its downward momentum was still sufficient to drive the engine block several metres into the ice-hardened earth; but the ‘pancake’ impact suggested that the two pilots may have been heart-breakingly close to levelling out when they ran out of sky.
The central question was: why had the plane lost control in the first place? Obviously it had not collided with another plane, otherwise it would have disintegrated in mid-air, scattering wreckage across a much larger area of ground. And there would have been signs of wreckage of the plane which it had collided with.
The crash seemed a puzzle. The investigators turned for answers to the service record of Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG. Perhaps the ageing jet had somehow failed, or lost power? The commission noted several concerns:
Shortcomings of the equipment and procedures used in the flight:
1 The MiG-15UTI aircraft was old, produced in 1956 and subject to two major overhauls. The residual service life of the structure was down to 30 per cent.
2 The engine, DA-450, was also produced in 1956 and subject to four overhauls. Residual service life was 30 per cent.
3 Installed on the aircraft were two 260-litre external tanks which were aerodynamically poor, reducing allowable g-loads by a factor of three.
4 The crew ejection system required the instructor to be the first to eject.
5 The height-to-ground altimeter was faulty.6
Gagarin and Serugin flew with expendable drop-away fuel pods under the wings. Leonov says, ‘There was always a drawback with this configuration. The dynamic design of the fuel tanks reduced the safety parameters of a flight, such as the angle of attack, the angles of sliding, and g-forces.’ Drop-tanks were not required to sustain a brief training sortie directly over home base. The tanks’ usual purpose was to supply a combat MiG with enough fuel to reach foreign enemy territory. When it reached its intended war zone and began to fight, the MiG was supposed to drop the depleted tanks in order to regain maximum nimbleness and speed. On March 27 a pair of tanks was installed on Gagarin’s training plane so as to familiarize him with the extra care he would have to take while they were in place. They should not have presented any special problems. All MiG pilots understood the strict regulations forbidding them to attempt simulated combat manoeuvres with the tanks attached.
In general, the MiG-15UTI was a rugged machine that allowed its cadet students plenty of margin for error – tanks or no tanks. Everyone called the UTI configuration ‘mother’, because so many thousands of pilots had learned to fly aboard these two-seater machines. Despite doubts about the age of Gagarin’s jet, and its damning record of overhauls, the wreckage did not suggest that any structural failures had occurred prior to the crash itself. So why did an intact and fully functioning MiG suddenly fall to earth? Seeking an explanation, the commission looked into the weather reports for the day of the crash:
Difficult weather conditions became gradually worse, as evidenced by ring-shaped pressure contours on the meteorological charts, and eye-witness accounts. Inaccurate weather information was given [to the pilots] during pre-flight preparation because the sortie of the weather reconnaissance planes was delayed.7
Apparently Serugin was misinformed that the cloud base was at 1,000 metres, when in fact it was down to 450 metres. A slight fault in the MiG’s instrumentation prevented its altimeter from responding accurately if the plane was in a dive. Serugin may have descended through the cloud layer thinking that he had twice the height margin over the ground than was actually the case. The difference in flight time would not