Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [108]
But the canopy frame in the wreckage did not have much plexiglass left within it. Most of the transparent material was shattered, and only a very small proportion was recovered at the wreck site. This was the only physical evidence in the entire investigation that directly suggested a mid-air collision of some kind. If the MiG had smashed into another plane, there would have been much more in-flight damage than merely the shattering of the canopy. The missing glass was suggestive of a grazing impact with a bird, or with the suspended instrument package of a stray weather balloon – and this is the principal explanation for the crash that the commission eventually settled on, based on the one solid piece of evidence: that the plexiglass was missing. Serugin and Gagarin lost control of their plane when the canopy shattered, and did not quite manage to recover.
The KGB conducted a parallel investigation, not just alongside the Air Force and the official commission members but against them. Their report also focused on the simplest possible explanation, as adopted by the commission, based on the shattered cockpit canopy. One of the KGB investigators, Nikolai Rubkin, today a ‘State security expert’, knows all aspects of the security service’s relationship to the early space effort. He is one of the few people who can gain access to the voluminous original report, stashed way even now in the bowels of the Lubyanka. He says, ‘The missing plexiglass in the canopy meant that something must have hit the cockpit before the crash. A bird strike would tend to hit the front of the canopy, not the top. An impact with an aircraft would have created much more damage. The missing glass is more consistent with an impact against the suspended instrument package of a weather balloon.’ So could the commission’s findings actually be correct? ‘The only indisputable fact is that the cockpit canopy glass was broken before the plane hit the ground,’ Rubkin says, carefully. ‘Everything else is guesswork. Only Gagarin and Serugin could tell us the truth about what really happened that day.’
Rubkin puts the investigation’s politics into broad perspective: ‘There were several sub-commissions investigating different areas. One of them dealt with the aircraft’s maintenance, another with pilot preparation, a third with the fuelling and tank installation, and a fourth examined all the medical matters. Finally there was another looking into any possibility of sabotage, or a revenge plot. That last was very much the KGB’s responsibility at the time.’ The problem – as so often with a high-profile and politically sensitive investigation – was that the five sub-commission teams did not communicate with each other. ‘Since there were several major institutions responsible for all these various areas, and the KGB had its own departments, the sub-commissions’ documentation was never assembled as one coherent package for the main commission. The reason was that too many interested parties worked for institutions that might have been found responsible for the crash. Certain people, whether we like it or not, adjusted the facts to save their honour. I found a report from General Mikoyan, the famous man who designed the MiG in the first place, saying that he was completely dissatisfied with the way the investigation was carried out.’
Alexei Leonov and Sergei Belotserkovsky also remained thoroughly dissatisfied with the commission’s work. They thought the weather-balloon theory was completely wrong. Leonov thinks he knows exactly what happened that day. ‘Another plane passed very close to Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG in the clouds, coming within ten, fifteen, twenty metres. The vortex [backwash] from the other plane turned the MiG upside-down and caused the loss of control and the crash.’
Leonov’s theory about aerodynamic interference from another plane provides a credible explanation for the disaster, except that