Spaceman’s death still a mystery

50 YEARS AGO: FIRST MAN IN SPACE DIED IN PLANE CRASH

‘Secrecy around cosmonaut’s death meant to hide flaws’.

Moscow

Yuri Gagarin, feted as a Soviet national hero for being the first man in space, was killed in a plane crash 50 years ago but the details of his death remain shrouded in mystery.

On March 27, 1968, at 10.18am, Gagarin was preparing for a training flight in his MiG-15 plane at the Chkalovsky aerodrome near Moscow, his former cosmonaut colleague Vladimir Aksyonov, 84, recalls.

“Yuri and I consulted the same doctors and listened to the same weather forecasts, my takeoff was due an hour after his,” he said.

But Aksyonov’s flight was cancelled. At 10.30am, when he returned to his base, Gagarin and his co-pilot Vladimir Seryogin were no longer responding to radio calls. At 2.50pm, helicopter crews searching for the plane said they found parts of the wreckage 65km from the aerodrome.

Gagarin’s body was found the next day. He was 34.

For the first time in Soviet history, a day of national mourning was declared for someone who was not a head of state.

The engineers knew Gagarin was training on a MiG and that he had already experienced landing problems. When they heard the investigation commission give its conclusions, they were perplexed.

According to the official version, the plane’s crew had to make a sudden manoeuvre because of a “change in the situation in the air”, which led to the crash.

Alexander Volodko, a policeman, said he believed the version of legendary cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who says a Sukhoi plane approached Gagarin’s planned route, passing less than 20 metres from his plane. This would have caused Gagarin’s aircraft to spin and crash.

But until the investigation’s official documents are made public, said Alexander Glushko, a historian studying the Soviet space industry, “this claim is just a hypothesis. None of the documents of the investigation was published in full,” he said.

He believes the secrecy around Gagarin’s death was retained to hide “the flaws in the organisation and the functioning of the Soviet space sector” – a symbol of the USSR’s might. –

Picture: AFP NATIONAL HERO. People walk past a statue of Yuri Gagarin as they visit the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow, last week. Gagarin died on a plane 50 years ago and his death remains a mystery.