Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [112]
Belotserkovsky discovered that all the radar operators were hopelessly confused at the time of the crash. ‘First of all, I noticed that the tapes of the conversation between the flight controller and Gagarin’s plane contain a curious moment. The thing is, the controller was still calling out Gagarin’s call sign, six-two-five, after his plane had already crashed. The controller’s voice was perfectly calm. He wasn’t nervous. But from minute forty-two of the tape, he did show some nervousness. That was about twelve minutes after the crash.’ Belotserkovsky was suspicious about the long delay in the controller’s reactions. Even allowing for the sluggish response of the radar equipment, the MiG-15’s blip must have dropped off the screens eventually, as the actual aircraft plunged towards the ground, but it took a full twelve minutes for the controllers to realize that anything was wrong. This may explain the ten-minute discrepancy in the timing of the crash that Bykovsky describes, with some discomfort, in his interview.
Belotserkovsky found many other flaws in the ground-control procedures, and in the original commission’s fudged report. The standard practice back in 1968 was to make photographic records of traffic-control radar screens at set intervals. An automatic system of cameras was built into the consoles to do this, but on March 27 the cameras at Chkalovsky were not working, so the controllers resorted to a crude back-up recording system. They placed pre-cut sheets of tracing paper across their radar screens and marked the positions of the various targets at intervals. Belotserkovsky found the old and faded sheets tucked discreetly into a folder marked ‘secondary material’, as if to disguise their importance. ‘There was a whole spectrum of conditions that we did not manage to cover while working on the original commission. We agreed that two particular lines of evidence, the voice tapes and the tracing-paper sheets, showed that the traffic controller was talking to a different plane, which he mistook for Gagarin’s. Most likely, Gagarin’s plane got so close to the other plane that they appeared for a moment on the radar screen as a single target. When Gagarin’s plane went into a spin, the other one was still on the screen.’
In the poor weather, and with no warnings from ground controllers, the crew of the other jet may not even have been aware of the near-miss. But some retired Sukhoi SU-11 veteran out there may well be keeping his head down today.
Gagarin’s death was shameful not just because of the loss of a national hero in muddled circumstances, but because of the dangerous flaws revealed in the Soviet military technology of his time. Obviously their radar systems were not capable of simultaneous mapping of aircraft heights and positions, nor of positively identifying one target from another. The implications of this were highly alarming. In theory, a foreign jet simulating approximately the usual routines and flight patterns of Soviet aircraft could have flown close to an airbase, or some other military target, without clearly being identified as a potential enemy. In all likelihood Gary Power’s U-2 spy craft, shot down in May 1960, was identified as hostile only because its flight path was noticeably different from the expected routes of other Soviet aircraft that day.
EPILOGUE
There have always been rumours that Yuri Gagarin was murdered by Leonid Brezhnev’s administration. Journalists, friends and relatives still talk of dark plots, although their anger is more metaphorical than literal. There is no real evidence to suggest that Gagarin’s crash was anything other than an accident. Incompetence and poor administration at many levels