The mystery of the death of the football team "Pakhtakor": The history of one of the largest plane crashes in the USSR

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

39 years ago, on August 11, 1979, there was one of the worst plane crashes in the history of the USSR: two Tu-134 passenger aircraft collided in the sky over Dneprodzerzhinsk. As a result, 178 people died, including 17 members football team "Pakhtakor" … Air traffic controllers were found guilty of this tragedy, although the circumstances of the disaster seem too strange to many and still give rise to many versions regarding its causes.

One of the liners was heading from Voronezh to Chisinau, there were 88 passengers and 6 crew members on board. The second plane was on its way from Tashkent to Minsk. In addition to 14 football players, a coach, a doctor and an administrator, there were another 60 passengers and 7 crew members on board. All 178 people died in this disaster, including 36 children.

The plane crash was reported in the media only a week later, and even then in passing, on the last page of a sports publication, in a small note that spoke about the funeral of the dead football players in Tashkent. There was no information about this in the central press. The tragedy would not have become so resonant if members of a major league football team were not among the dead. According to many fans, this was the best squad in the history of the Tashkent club's existence. The team was heading to the next match of the USSR championship in Minsk, where it was supposed to play with the local Dynamo.

The head coach of the team Oleg Bazilevich miraculously survived, who went to see his family and had to get to Minsk on his own. The club's masseur, Dvornikov, was also lucky to avoid tragedy: the day before, he and his friends drank too much and missed the flight. But one of the best football players of the team, Mikhail An, was injured a few days earlier and was not supposed to fly, but he was persuaded to go along with everyone for the company. Sirozhiddin Bazarov, a player of the youth team, who celebrated his 18th birthday the day before and stayed in Tashkent for a day, accidentally got on the flight.

Two dispatchers of the Kharkov control center, Nikolai Zhukovsky and Vladimir Sumsky, were found guilty of the tragedy. Both planes crossed each other at an altitude of 8400 meters. Shift senior Sergeev sent a young inexperienced dispatcher Zhukovsky to a difficult section. According to his calculations, the planes had to pass the conditional intersection point with a difference of three minutes, but in fact the interval was less than one minute. Sumskiy checked the calculations of a young colleague and found an error. He took control and ordered the Belarusian liner to take another flight level (go to an altitude of 9000 meters).

The dispatcher received an indistinct answer, but did not demand confirmation of the execution of his command. At that moment, 11 aircraft were simultaneously connected. Due to radio interference and overlapping replicas, the Tu-134 did not accept the dispatcher's command. The collision took place in overcast conditions, and the crews could not notice each other in advance. The dispatchers of Sumy and Zhukovsky were sentenced to 15 years in a general regime colony. The first served a term of 6, 5 years, after which he was released, and the second, according to rumors, committed suicide.

Later, several versions were put forward about the causes of the disaster. According to one of them, the tragedy happened through the fault of the first person of the state: supposedly the airspace was “cleared” that day because Brezhnev was flying south. But, as it turned out, at that time he had already been in Crimea for several days. Shortly before the disaster, there was indeed a "letter" flight, as the transportation of dignitaries was called. Echelons of movement were freed for him, but this did not create any additional difficulties - the collision occurred an hour and a half after that.

Coach Oleg Bazilevich later expressed this version: "". Some relatives of the deceased footballers also adhered to this version. However, at this time, military exercises were not carried out on this territory, and it is hardly possible to view defense objects from an altitude of 8400 meters in cloudy conditions. In addition, the nature of damage from an explosion is significantly different from damage from a collision and a fall.

Obviously, the reason for the collision was the controller's mistake: having received an indistinct answer from the pilot, he had to duplicate the command and demand a second confirmation of its receipt (this is what the court called "a gross violation of the phraseology of radio exchange").

After the disaster, a new team of players from 15 clubs was assembled. It was decided to keep Pakhtakor's place in the top league of the USSR championship for three years. The team finished in ninth place that season. The death of football players shocked Uzbekistan. Journalist Eduard Avanesov responded to this tragedy with a requiem, which contained the following lines:

The details of this plane crash became known only a few years later, as well as many other tragic pages in the history of the Land of the Soviets. Today about what Soviet people were proud of and what they were not told about, reading is interesting and exciting. After all, such stories are transferred to a completely different era.