A few minutes before 16:00 on October 20, 1986, a Tupolev Tu-134 was coming into Kuibyshev, the Soviet city now called Samara, dangerously fast. In the cockpit, the windows had been covered so the captain could not see the runway he was trying to land on.[1][2]
Aeroflot Flight 6502 crashed after Captain Alexander Kliuyev bet he could land by instruments alone with the cockpit windows curtained. The plane overran the runway, flipped over, caught fire, and 70 of the 94 people aboard were killed.
The flight had begun as an ordinary domestic trip from Sverdlovsk, now Yekaterinburg, to Grozny, with a scheduled stop at Kuibyshev Airport. On board were 87 passengers and 7 crew members, including 14 children.[1][2] The Tu-134A was crewed by Captain Alexander Kliuyev, First Officer Gennady Zhirnov, navigator Ivan Mokhonko, flight engineer Kyuri Khamzatov, and three flight attendants.[1]
Before the stopover, according to later accounts, Kliuyev made the wager that would define the flight. He told Zhirnov he could bring the aircraft down without looking outside, relying only on the cockpit instruments. To make the bet real, the cockpit windows were curtained or blocked, cutting off visual contact with the ground.[1][2]
Air traffic control had suggested an NDB approach, a non-directional beacon procedure used to guide aircraft toward an airport. Kliuyev continued with his instrument-only landing instead.[1] As the plane descended, warnings sounded. At roughly 62 to 65 meters above the ground, about 203 to 213 feet, the ground-proximity warning activated. Kliuyev did not go around.[1][3]
The Tu-134 touched down at about 150 knots, roughly 280 kilometers per hour or 170 miles per hour.[1] It overran the runway, flipped upside down, and caught fire.[1][3] Russia Beyond, citing firefighter V. Frygin, reported that airport firefighters reached the wreckage in about a minute and a half, entering smoke and flame while passengers were still trapped inside.[2]
The passenger cabin had become inverted. Frygin later described seeing victims above him in their seat belts because the aircraft had rolled over, leaving the seats and passengers upside down.[2] The crash killed dozens at the scene, with more victims dying later in hospitals. The commonly reported total was 70 dead out of 94 people on board.[1][3] All 14 children aboard survived.[1][3]
Investigators concluded that pilot negligence caused the disaster.[1] Kliuyev was later tried and sentenced to 15 years in prison, though the term was reportedly reduced and he served six years.[3] Zhirnov, the first officer who had accepted the bet, survived the crash at first and reportedly tried to help others, but died of cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital.[3]
Aeroflot Flight 6502 is remembered for the smallness of the act that began it. No storm hid the runway. No secret mechanical failure forced the descent. There was a curtain across a cockpit window, a warning at about two hundred feet, and a passenger jet arriving upside down with people still strapped into their seats.[1][2]
