The catastrophe that decapitated the aviation industry and the air fleet

On the morning of September 5, 1933, as a result of the accident of the ANT-7 aircraft, which occurred south of Podolsk, near the Lopasnya station, 2 crew members and 6 passengers died, five of whom were leaders of the aviation industry and civil aviation of the USSR.

Brief information about this tragic incident was published the next day in the Pravda newspaper:

September 5 at 9 a.m. 20 minutes. south of Podolsk, near the Lopasnya station, as a result of an aircraft accident, the following people died: Deputy People’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, Head of the Main Directorate of the Aviation Industry Comrade Petr Ionovich Baranov; Head of the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet Comrade Goltsman A.3.; Director of the Moscow Aviation Plant No. 22 Comrade S.P. Gorbunov; deputy Head of the Main Directorate of the Civil Air Fleet Comrade Petrov A.V.; member of the Presidium of the State Planning Committee of the USSR Comrade Zarzar V.A.; chief pilot Comrade Dorfman I.M., flight engineer Plotnikov N.E. etc. Baranova B.M. The government has assigned personal pensions to the families of the victims.”

Mentioned next to the crew (chief pilot and flight engineer) “t. Baranova B.M.” (Baranova Bella Moiseevna) is the wife of Pyotr Ionovich Baranov, who begged her husband to take her with him on this fateful flight to the Crimea, where their children were resting. All other passengers – leaders of the aviation industry and civil aviation of the USSR – flew to the opening of a new aircraft plant in Sevastopol.

The ANT-7 aircraft, on which the flight was made, was, as reported in the book by Nikolai Bodrikhin “Tupolev”, published in the ZhZL series, an experimental version of an eight-seat passenger aircraft converted at the aviation plant No. 22 in Fili in July 1933 from a reconnaissance aircraft R -6.

As described in the book of Nikolai Bodrikhin with reference to the memoirs of Academician Boris Chertok, who then worked at the plant, the prototype ANT-7 was made in a single copy. All weapons were removed from the former reconnaissance aircraft, and eight passenger seats were placed in the fuselage. The cockpit was glazed. The plane made the first test flights in the area of ​​the factory airfield, after which an order suddenly came to prepare it for a long-distance flight to the Crimea by installing additional gas tanks. However, the aircraft was not equipped with instruments for blind flight at night and in conditions of poor visibility, which probably caused the crash.

On September 5, 1933, the weather conditions were bad, but Pyotr Baranov insisted on taking off. At 9 am ANT-7 took off from Moscow. 20 minutes later, in the Podolsk region, an airliner flying at low altitude caught the wire of an amateur radio antenna, which was stretched on high poles, with its landing gear. Then, as Boris Chertok recalled, the plane “touched the left plane with the aileron on the top of the high willow. The left wing console fell off, and the aircraft’s nose hit the ground and disintegrated.” All 8 people on board were killed.

As reported in the book of Nikolai Bodrikhin, “the cause of the disaster was not a mystery – it resembled to the smallest detail the one that happened with ANT-9 (July 12, 1931, the accident happened near Naro-Fominsk. – S.I.) – then the deputy chief of staff of the Red Army V.K. Triandafillov with the famous pilot S.T. Rybalchuk. On July 12, also on a foggy morning, Rybalchuk decided to fly, regardless of the weather conditions, however, due to the fact that the flight took place at low altitude, the plane caught trees near the Alabino platform, after which it fell to the ground and collapsed, and all those on board people – 3 passengers and 5 crew members – died.

In September 1933, Joseph Stalin learned about the disaster with ANT-7 while on vacation in Sochi. After that, he sent a telegram to Lazar Kaganovich, who remained in Moscow “in charge”, which stated that “it is necessary to prohibit, under pain of expulsion from the party, the flights of non-pilot workers without the permission of the Central Committee. We must strictly enforce the prohibition and be sure to exclude the guilty, regardless of their faces.

By coincidence, which was involuntarily perceived as a manifestation of the “black” irony of fate, this catastrophe, which decapitated the aviation industry and the air fleet of the USSR, occurred less than a month after the country celebrated Aviation Day for the first time on August 18, 1933.

Sergei Ishkov.