Antonovich, and the commander of the 2nd Squadron, Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Semonich, a former PVO Yak-28 pilot who had spent most of his career in the Far East.
When Semonich came to Tskhakaya the previous autumn, he gave the impression of definitely being a hard- assed fighter pilot. He quickly let it be known that he had been named a squadron commander twelve years before, when he was only a senior lieutenant. Speaking in a rough, deep voice, Semonich also let all the younger pilots know that he had flown thousands of sorties in some of the worst flying conditions possible.
At the time, I guessed that this bluster was a defense mechanism; Semonich had made the transition from the clumsy old Yak-28 to the MiG-23, then to the MiG-29. He might well have flown thousands of “elevator ride” sorties as a PVO interceptor pilot under tight GCI vector control, but that fact had little to do with his true ability as a fighter pilot.
The officers were sent to Lipetsk for a one-month low-altitude maneuver course. On their return, they had to fly a series of structured sorties and then would be officially qualified to become our low-level instructors. Antonovich was a natural fighter pilot, a short Byelorussian who really could fly anything with wings. We were all pleased that he would be one of our instructors for dangerous low-altitude air combat. Most of us reserved judgment about Semonich; if he flew as well as he talked, he’d probably be satisfactory.
Monday, July 14, 1986, was one of those summer days of low overcast and oppressive humidity that often afflicted the coastal region of Georgia. My squadron was scheduled for ground-attack training on the poligon near Kulevi, but we all realized the first sortie would have to be delayed until the overcast lifted. Antonovich and Semonich had the last of their low-altitude acrobatic exercises to complete. And they had to fly them that day because the mandatory forty-five-day limit since their Lipetsk instruction was almost over.
We all knew that Colonel Torbov wanted them qualified. In the briefing room it was obvious that Lieutenant Colonel Antonovich was resigned to returning to Lipetsk for a refresher course. But Semonich seemed determined to fly his aerobatics, despite the low ceiling.
By takeoff time, the ragged gray cloud deck was below the minimum 3,000 feet required for their aerobatics exercises. The safety norms were set with a minimum recovery altitude of 600 feet for vertical maneuvers like loops and split-S’s, and the initiation altitude had to be 3,000 feet — clear of any cloud deck.
Antonovich took off first, flying a MiG-23UB on a weather check, to make sure they had their minimums. Semonich followed at exactly nine o’clock in a MiG-29. The weather report was not good: Antonovich called that he had a ceiling of only 1,800 feet when he flew the length of the aerobatics oval, just north of the base. But when Semonich turned into the oval, he called out that he had exactly 3,000 feet and was about to commence his first maneuver.
We were all lined up on the parking apron, watching the two planes lace in and out of the gray cloud tendrils. I expected the safety officer in the tower to recall Semonich. Always the tough fighter pilot, he’d made his point. But no recall was sounded. Semonich flew two circles to verify the exact level of the ceiling, then performed his first maneuver, a combat turn. Unfortunately the cloud base was uneven, at some points billowing down to a mere 2,700 feet. The next scheduled maneuver was a wingover, in which Semonich would perform a two-thirds roll to inverted flight, left wing down, then haul back on the stick, still inverted, and whip back into a steep dive — similar to the bottom leg of a loop — and recover to a climb without breaching the 600-foot safety limit.
The moment he began his wingover, rolling into inverted flight, he sliced into the cloud deck for several seconds.
Flying inverted in clouds was dangerous. Even the best pilots could experience vertigo. And we watched with mounting alarm as Semonich — still inverted — sank out of the cotton-thick base of the ceiling.
“Roll over, you fool,” a pilot down the line shouted.
We all expected Semonich to snap back to level flight and discontinue the aerobatics. But he held his course, in inverted flight, as if he could not decide whether to pull his stick back to begin the maneuver or not.
Finally his nose dipped and he swung the plane sluggishly down into a vertical dive toward the runway. To execute a proper wingover, you had to handle your throttles precisely, going to military power before entering the base of the pendulum loop and climbing into your recovery. But as we watched in stricken silence, Semonich’s plane fell, still inverted, straight toward the ground across the runway. He slowly pulled up and his nose began to rise in the round-out maneuver. But he simply wasn’t climbing.
“Climb… now… now,” I shouted. “He’s too low. He’s too damn low.”
Semonich was through the base of the maneuver, still nose-high for his climb out. But the aircraft continued to sink inexorably, as if being dragged to the ground by invisible wires.
“Forsazh!” someone shouted nearby. “Afterburner!”
But we saw no orange burner flame and heard no throaty boom. Instead the aircraft continued sinking, almost gently, like a flat pebble in water. When the MiG-29 hit, there was no loud explosion, only a soft, muffled puff. The red and black fireball was strangely silent. We waited, frozen in place, for Semonich’s ejection seat to blast through that greasy mushroom of smoke. It never came.
The board of inquiry from Moscow was led by MiG-29 Chief Designer Mikhail Waldenburg and Chief Test Pilot Valery Menitsky. They determined that Lieutenant Colonel Semonich had left his throttles on idle throughout the entire maneuver. They also discovered that he had spent the weekend drinking heavily on fishing trips to the nearby lakes. The blood alcohol level in his body was beyond acceptable limits. Unfortunately our regular doctor, Major Blustein, who never would have allowed Semonich to fly, was not on duty that morning.
And the accident board discovered something even more disturbing. Many of the “thousands” of training sorties in Semonich’s logbook had been faked. He really had been just a mediocre PVO pilot who had taken the risk to fly aircraft far beyond his ability.
Instead of celebrating my twenty-fifth birthday that week, we buried Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Semonich.
There was no mention of the accident in either the civilian or the military press.
That autumn I received orders to come to the military test pilot school at Akhtubinsk for my first official interview. If I successfully passed this stage of the process, I would be invited to take the formal written and oral examinations the next summer.
But even for this preliminary screening, I’d had to assemble eighteen separate documents.
I took the train from Sochi to Volgagrad and then traveled south along the river by bus. Once we were clear of the city’s industrial suburbs, the countryside became bleak and marshy. This brackish floodplain of the Volga River had never been prosperous, and the number of large, ill-conceived drainage projects had failed. The solid concrete highway stretched on toward the flat horizon, seemingly a road to nowhere.
Then we passed the guard posts and barbed-wire fences marking the entrance of the Kapustin Yar military space center. This was one of the Soviet Union’s chief missile test ranges. The uniformed KGB guards I glimpsed through the bus window were all heavily armed. Akhtubinsk lay twenty-five miles south of this strange highway through the salt marshes.
This desolate area, however, was not completely deserted. Twice we passed through villages. The log houses stood at crooked angles among the winter-brown reeds, their thatched roofs sagging like swayback horses. These were some of the poorest towns I had ever seen anywhere in the Soviet Union. A few rusty tractors and a battered farm truck with three flat tires were the only vehicles I saw. The only people in evidence looked old and lost. They wore the faded, threadbare work clothes of hopeless kolkhozniki collective farm workers for whom all promises had been broken. An old woman stood at a well, drawing water with a crudely patched rubber bucket. As the bus rolled by, I stared into her eyes, but saw no flicker of recognition.
Half an hour later, we rolled into Akhtubinsk, a closed military city of 35,000. After the desolation of the nearby villages, the modern town seemed incongruous. I didn’t have to report to the center until the next morning, so I had the afternoon and evening free. After I checked into the officers’ hotel, I strolled into the city center, looking for a cafe or a restaurant. But block after block, all I found were featureless office buildings and standard seven-story apartment units. Finally I located a produkty State food store. If I couldn’t eat a hot meal, I thought, at least I’d buy some sausage and cheese to take back to my room.
Inside I found two women clerks in soiled white smocks, chatting quietly at the cashier’s counter. The shelves and refrigerator cases were almost completely empty. The only food I discovered was a heap of one-kilo white bread loaves that were stale and hard, a few sacks of rice, and a forlorn row of pickled green tomatoes in dusty jars with rusty lids. Those were the total “food products” available in the store.
“Excuse me,” I said, approaching the clerks. “Where can I get something to eat?”
