Tested in the sky

Gallay Mark Lazarevich

TU-4 - FAR, ALTITUDE, SPEED ...

TU-4 - FAR, ALTITUDE, SPEED ...

Not a year has passed since the day of the end of testing the first domestic jet aircraft.

And here again the "transplant". This time we had to test a new powerful - by those,
of course, at times - strategic four-engine Tu-4 bomber.

The story behind this car was unusual. Design Bureau A.N. Tupolev received a
government task to create the aircraft as soon as possible on the model of the
American strategic bomber Boeing 29 - Superfortress. I think it is unlikely that
Tupolev liked this task very much - his design bureau would, without a doubt, do
without copying anything from anyone, the plane is no worse than the B-29. But
exactly - the plane itself. And the task was, first of all, in overcoming our backlog in
equipment, aviation electronics, and a number of technological innovations. Using
the experience of world aircraft manufacturing in this situation was indeed the fastest
and most direct way to solving the problem. A man of state mentality, Tupolev could
not help but see this.

In subsequent years, the history of the creation of the “Fourth” has been commented
more than once. They argued about what it was: a copy or an analogue? I’m not sure
that the terminological discussions on this topic make sense: anyway, whatever
answer you give here, the essence of the matter will not change.

... The scope for the creation of the Tu-4 was given from the very beginning unusually
wide. Even it was laid not in one, and not in two, and not even in three prototypes,
but immediately in a small series.

Two dozen cars of this series were supposed to leave the assembly and begin testing
at short intervals, one after another. The honorary assignment to lead the crew of the
first lead aircraft was received by N.S. Rybko.

I was appointed commander of the next ship, the “deuce”. My sponsored MiG-9
shortly before that was safely introduced into the series, and I, after a long period of
flying on fighter jets, was not averse to working on heavy ships for a change. As well,
however, as after heavy ships I was relentlessly drawn to small maneuverable
aircraft. The firmly ingrained habit of flying into the air on aircraft of various types
has become a need.

But not only the “desire for a change of place” drew me to the “Fourth.”

It was really very interesting, progressive car at that time.

True, it could not be said that the inherent flight data was not previously known to
pilots. No, we have already flown at the same altitudes, with the same speeds, to the
same ranges. But - separately, on different planes.

Some of them developed great speed, but they did not fly very high and very
close. Others - the so-called high-altitude - differed only in a good ceiling to the
detriment of other flight data. There were special long-range aircraft, such as the
ANT-25, which earned world fame, on which M.M. test pilots Gromov, A.I. Eagle owl,
V.P. Chkalov, G.F. Baydukov, A.B. Yumashev and navigators I.T. Spirin,
A.V. Belyakov, S.A. Danilin made several record flights: on a closed curve, to the Far
East and through the North Pole - to America. But the average flight speed of even
this exceptionally successful machine of its kind barely exceeded ... 160 kilometers
per hour! And its ceiling was such that, having got into a bad weather zone, the crew
was forced to either go around it and lose precious kilometers of record flight on it,

The development of some abilities was in such aircraft due to the almost complete
atrophy of others.

Imagine a man with powerful biceps, a muscular torso and legs of a weightlifter, but
the underdeveloped head of microcephalus. Or, on the contrary, a sort of brilliant
Socratic head of a mathematician and a chess player, mounted on a frail, weak
body. Both that and another would cause at least sympathy. The disharmonious
planes, however, did not evoke such emotions, but, I think, only because for the time
being we did not see harmonious planes and did not even really think about whether
they could really exist in nature.

Now such a question does not arise for anyone. Life itself answered it: many planes
fly these days at the same time both quickly, and high, and far.

Tu-4 was the first aircraft capable of flying thousands of kilometers on the border of
the stratosphere at a speed of 500-550 kilometers per hour - until recently, fighters
flew no faster than this!

It was called a distant, high-altitude, high-speed strategic bomber. And no matter

how dangerous such epithets are (I already wrote that a word, for example, “fast”,
which at first sounds rather proud, can naturally acquire a hint of bitter irony in a few
years), as applied to “The Fourth”, it was difficult to resist them. A considerable
impression was also made by his unprecedented saturation with all kinds of electrics:
there were several hundreds of various kinds of electric machines — motors,
generators, converters.

- What should I say! Ohm’s law is not enough here, ”one of my colleagues gloomily
declared, taking up the task of studying the thick folios of her technical descriptions
before taking the helm of a new car. And this helm itself literally drowned in the
cockpit among the remotes, densely studded with a multitude of seemingly identical
miniature shiny fingers - toggle switches. Before that, we got used to leverage, the
more solid in size, the more important their function. So, for example, the lever for
cleaning and releasing the chassis - it was always really a lever: prominent, large, with
a colored handle. And here, huge, almost as tall as a man, twin wheels of the chassis
obeyed the tiny toggle switch, which was almost no different from its neighbors,
which was tricky to pick up on with a fur glove.

However, there was no need for fur gloves. The cabin was airtight, and in it,
regardless of the flight altitude, air pressure was kept, not much different from the
earth, and a uniform room temperature. About what crackling frost reigns outside, it
was possible to judge only by the testimony of an outboard thermometer.

It seems to the modern air passenger, and the professional pilot of our day, that it
cannot be otherwise. But we sinners managed to fly one and a half to two decades in
unpressurized, and at first - even stronger - open cabins, where the pilot was
protected from the burning-ice stream of the oncoming air stream with only a light
Plexiglass visor. I had to fly in warm overalls, high fur boots, and sometimes even in
masks - not oxygen, but ordinary ones, covering the whole face, which otherwise
would have been instantly frostbitten.

It was especially disgusting to go to heights in the hot summer. The process of

dressing in all these polar armor was carried out at the aircraft itself - in the shade
under the wing. At the same time, the pilot - like the royal family surrounded by
courtiers during the morning toilet - only held out his hand or foot, and his faithful
mechanical friends packed it quickly and then planted it in the cockpit. But, despite
all these precautions, by the time of take-off the pilot managed to become wet like a
mouse. And at the height, as it became colder, the sweat cooled off: there was a
feeling as if you poured cold water by the collar.

At the end of the flight, everything was repeated in reverse order. Sinking down, as if
into a freshly melted stove, into the hot surface layers of the atmosphere, the barely
"dried up" pilot soaked a second time. This process culminated in the landing. And it
was still necessary to taxi into the parking lot, get out of the cockpit, take off the
parachute and only after that, with the help of the same mechanical friends, get out of
the wet through - at least squeeze it! - uniforms.

The figurative expression - “seven sweats came off” - acquired a completely real
meaning.

It is easy to imagine with what approval the pilots met such an innovation as a closed,
and then hermetic cabin.

... And now there came a time when the crew of Nikolai Stepanovich Rybko, the
second pilot Ivan Ivanovich Shuneiko and the lead engineer Vartan Nikitovich
Saginov, accompanied by good wishes, jokes, errands, escorting off (in other words,
all the test pilots of our institute who were free at that moment from this ), plunged
into the transport Li-2 and flew to the factory. There, the first of twenty small
experimental series cars was already ready for publication. Serious work awaited our
friends: the first are always the first!

***

They flew in two weeks.

At the factory airfield, Rybko successfully made his first flight and several fine-tuning
flights, but the real tests under the main program should have been carried out at our
base airfield.

The wait on this day began in the morning.

Finally a radiogram: flew out. An hour later, in the control room, where, contrary to
the menacing sign on the door “No one is strictly forbidden to outsiders,” all the free
pilots were sticking out (their expulsion from there was significantly hampered by the
lack of an accurate legal interpretation of the term “outsider”), a phone call came
from the radio operator:

- There is a direct connection with the Rybko board. Everything is fine. Will be with

us in thirty-eight minutes.

Exactly - a minute per minute, as promised, in the east a steady, bass rumble of four
engines arose and began to intensify continuously, and from behind the forest a wide
dash appeared with five circles stuck on it: four motors and a fuselage.

The Tu-4 is approaching, passing over us - now we see it in plan. The ship makes a
circle, comes in for landing, gently lands and taxiing into the parking lot. The crew
crawls out of the cockpit to the ground. Congratulations, greetings, questions that do
not require answers, answers to unanswered questions - in a word, utter nonsense!

The culprit of the celebration - a fresh, little white, neat Tu-4 No. 001 - stands on the
line, surrounded by many ladders, on which a good two dozen mechanics have
already settled down. Cooling motors crackle nicely. Covers are pulled on the
covers. The car got home ...

By the end of the day, when the excitement had subsided somewhat, I pulled Rybko
out onto the airfield and, walking along the grass behind the tails of the planes lined
up along the line, I finally received more detailed information about the “Fourth”.

“Nothing,” said Kolya, “works.” Management is a little taut, especially on the roll:

either the new cables have not yet stretched, or the friction in the rollers is a little too
big; but in general, to turn the helm, you need to work. Equipment? Imagine
acting! At least what we already included ...

The information was encouraging.

And timely - a few days after the solemn arrival of the "unit" I flew to the factory for
the "deuce".

By the nature of my work, I have had to visit serial aviation plants more than
once. Either it was necessary to overtake some kind of machine, then to participate in
the verification of piloting technology for factory pilots, then — unfortunately, it
happened — to work as part of the next emergency commission. So almost all factory
airfields, and most importantly, the people working on them, were familiar to
me. This is important, because the entire crew of Tu-4 No. 002, with the exception of
the commander, was entirely staffed by local specialists.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Arzhanov, in the future Hero of the Soviet Union and Honored
Test Pilot of the USSR, was appointed the second pilot and at the same time the lead
engineer of the aircraft. He was, as they say, the indigenous native of the local flight
test station and for many years worked on it in a variety of roles: and as a leading
engineer, and a test pilot, and at one time even as the head of the station. In addition
to all other professional qualities, Nikolai Nikolaevich was distinguished by a purely
athletic build of a sort of Nordic hero - the circumstance in flights on heavy ships is by
no means superfluous. And most importantly, he was through and through his man
at the factory, he knew everyone and everything, just as everyone knew him, and in
everything that related to the so-called specifics of local conditions, he could be safely
and completely relied on. However, during the flight it quickly became clear

For some reason, his favorite address to his workmates was “boyar” (like the “king” of
Grinchik), and in the case of special favor for the interlocutor, “grand-boyar”. What
exactly this Teutonic-Slavic word combination was supposed to mean - I do not know,
but nevertheless, having been awarded this appeal for the first time, I felt flattered.

Our flight engineer was Anton Porfiryevich Bespalov. I must say that the flight
engineer on a heavy multi-engine ship is a figure of exceptional importance. The
lion's share of the power plant control in flight is carried out from its remote control,
which accordingly looks like a laboratory bench. The flight engineer is obliged to cope
with his entire complex economy “in flight” - quickly, clearly, accurately, without any
long reflections and buildup. And after returning from flight, he must also supervise
the work of dozens of people who make up the ground technical team. No wonder he
is called the “master of the plane”! In the person of Anton Porfiryevich, we had just
such a master: competent, knowledgeable, loving his equipment, able to organize the
work of his subordinates, calm and executive in flight.

All other crew members - and the assistant to the leading engineer S.V. Ivanenko, and
flight attendant I.M. Tyagunov, and onboard mechanics G.G. Irlyanov and
I.S. Ryazanov - all were matched one to another. The crew was professional -
everyone in their field - very strong and also friendly, which in such cases is also far
from unimportant.

When I arrived, the “deuce” stood on the line and passed a long program of preflight
ground tests.

The plane was stuck - outside and inside - by people rummaging in its giblets so that
it inspired unexpected concern: with such a rush, it is difficult to expect an
impeccable order. However, to my timid question: “What are they more there:
repairing or spoiling?” - Arjanov’s confident answer followed:

- But nothing: when they all leave, Porfirich with his guys will comb it all from head
to toe.

This was comforting: I already completely trusted Porfirich himself and everything
“combed” by them.

A lot of trouble, I remember, was with the cleaning and release of the
chassis. Outwardly, however, everything was going well: the car was hung on the
tragus (if it’s a tragus, what can be called goats?), And the chassis, obeying the switch
of the toggle switch in the cockpit, obediently, with a dull rumble crawled into its
niches covered by the wings, and then just as obediently crawled back. But the
current spent on these operations significantly exceeded the norm. They were afraid
that this indicates the presence of some invisible defects in the chassis mechanism for
the time being. So a few days passed (this is not a trifle: the exit schedule of the cars
was scheduled by the day and approved, as it was then expressed, above), filled with
technical, operational and all sorts of other meetings, mutual accusations of designers
and manufacturers, initiative proposals of the widest range - from “changing the
chassis "To" it will do. " Chemists saved the situation by proposing a new lubricant
composition for the chassis spindles. As soon as a new lubricant was applied, the
huge wheels began to be removed and really released “like clockwork” in the literal
sense of the word.

For me, another refinement was also instructive. The fact is that most of the bow of
the “Fourth” was completely glazed. It would seem that this should provide an
impeccable view from the workplaces of pilots. But in reality it turned out
differently. First of all, the review was hindered by the frequent “binding” grid - the
metal frame of the cabin, into which the glazing was fixed. Sitting in my chair, I was
convinced that one of the crosshairs of this binding sticks out right in front of me.

Then I - for the umpteenth time - paid for growing so long. All pilot cockpits were
made and are being made for the so-called “standard pilot”, exactly 175 centimeters
tall and with corresponding, strictly normalized sizes of arms and legs. This
imaginary, non-existent character - the “standard pilot” —has nonetheless managed
to become my personal enemy from time immemorial.

So, to look ahead in front of me, I had to either bend over or crank my neck
upward. So I’ve been done for many years every time I had to fly on the Tu-
fourth. But this didn’t save on the “deuce” either: curved glass, strengthened above
and below the unfortunate binding, terribly distorted the view. They obviously should
have been replaced, and the chief engineer of the plant, who had been spending the
night and spending the night on our line, said that this would be done.

Nevertheless, the next day he discovered old, worthless glass in complete inviolability
in their former places. To my question, why the order of the chief engineer is not
being implemented, he answered:

- How not to be performed? Everything goes on as usual. They prepare the

documentation, then they will lower the sheet of revision to production, and
everything will be done.

- Why such red tape, Mikhail Nikiforovich: documentation, a revision sheet? Call a

glass-master, explain to him the essence of the matter, he will do everything. Here,
after all, elementary common sense dictates ...

I seemed to myself very progressive at that moment - a sort of warrior with inertness
and formalism, fearlessly breaking the ossified forms of production
management. And for me a great revelation was the answer of the chief engineer:
- Common sense? Common sense is too sharp a weapon so that it can be
uncontrollably given into the hands of several thousand people. In our factory,
instead of it - a sheet of revision ...

Far from always being truly progressive what seems to be such at first sight.

***

The day of our departure on the "deuce" has arrived. None of us had any particular
doubts about how the airplane would behave in the air — whatever you say, the
invisible shadow of the Boeing 29 stood behind us, and the elder brother of our ship,
“one,” made this time there are already about a dozen successful flights. The only
thing that bothered me a bit was the factory airfield - unpaved and rather small, in
any case, much smaller than our institute. It had a shape close to elliptical. When
Rybko flew here on the “unit” two weeks ago, the direction of the wind allowed him to
take off and land along the long axis of the ellipse. Now, as luck would have it, the
wind changed, and I had to use the shortest direction to the already limited
airfield. True, according to calculations, the place should have been enough.

Starting to fly in a new car, the pilot always keeps landing speed a little more than the
calculated one. This is precisely the case when the proverb about the stock is
especially true, which, as you know, the pocket does not burden and does not ask to
drink or eat. Just making sure that there really is a reserve, the pilot gradually, from
flight to flight, reduces the speed of the approach until he reaches the one he
considers normal without reinsurance.

But you can afford it at a large test aerodrome. Here, from the very beginning, it was
necessary to approach the landing “without frills”.

We signed off on a flight mission, on a summary sheet of the car’s readiness for
departure, back in some papers, put on parachutes and climbed on a plane, waving
off the astronomical amount of the “last” instructions of the mourners (it’s amazing
how many messages seem extremely significant to their authors, pops up just before
the departure, when they are all the same and you don’t have time to digest them!).

Inspecting the cockpit, checking the internal aircraft communications, starting and
testing the engines - and we get off the parking lot. There is nothing new so far - the
day before departure, we already made several taxiing and jogging around the
airfield.

Taxiing to the runway, I saw a group of people - plant managers, designers, factory
pilots, numerous "representatives" and "commissioners" standing at the edge of the
strip, in the place where we had to start the run.

Only one person, separated from this group, walked slowly along the field forward, to
where we supposedly were to take off the ground.

It was Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev. So he got to the right place and stopped - tight, a
little hunched over, in a general's cap low on his head. I have rarely met in my life a
man who cares so little about what impression he makes on others. Perhaps this was
one of the reasons that he invariably made the strongest impression.

- Kutuzov! Arzhanov said respectfully, nodding at Tupolev.

Indeed, in the lonely standing figure of the chief designer there was something from
the commander who was meditating about the field of the upcoming battle. However,
in this case it was so: hardly the green, not very even airfield of the factory airfield
was perceived differently by Tupolev at that moment.

I was very busy on takeoff: whatever you say, the first flight is the first
flight! Nevertheless, he could not help but fix in some corner of his consciousness that
just at the moment of separation, a lone figure of a dense, stocky man in a general's
cap flashed in the left window of the cabin.

Takeoff went fine. The plane listened to the rudders as it should be for a machine of a
similar tonnage: it was impossible, of course, to demand from him sensitive, as if a
fighter, reaction to millimeter - almost mental - deviations of the handle. Here,
completely different movements were needed: broad, free, sweeping.

In flight, I immediately felt that the car is much "softer" than all I have known
before. Under the influence of air gusts, the ship “breathed” - its wings measured, in a
smooth dance rhythm, bent to the rhythm of air vibrations. When I saw this, I
thought about the hands of ballerinas in Swan Lake by association (may ballet lovers
forgive me this is a blasphemous, from their point of view, comparison).

And all the internal contents of the cockpit — pilot seats, dashboards, even pendant
fans — shook at the slightest clatter. It shook and rustled in different voices: it rattled,
rumbled, rang, creaked.

Over time, it became commonplace. But in the first flight on a new plane, each of its
features, including trifles that do not have the slightest business significance, is
perceived especially sharply.

But here we scored the set eight hundred meters, got out of the zone of chatterboxes
into calm layers of air, and immediately the cabin became quiet. That is, of course,
the motors continued to buzz, but this noise, no matter how strong, somehow does
not reach consciousness, probably because it is even. Another thing - the slightest
interruption in the operation of motors or any other intermittent, non-monotonous
sound - it will be noticed immediately. Noise and its perception by consciousness - it
turns out, are two different things. A person who has fallen asleep at the switched on
radio wakes up if suddenly the transmission ends and silence ensues.

So, it became quiet in the cockpit ... I turned out as soon as I could, and in such an
acrobatic pose I looked at the readings on the control panel of the flight
engineer. Soon, after only a few flights, I refused such gymnastic exercises, as I was
convinced that when at the control panel of the flight engineer Bespalov, you can not
think of motor devices.
Unfamiliar places sailed under us: some roads, forests, fields ... Arzhanov provided
me with great help in building the route. He knew literally every bush here and
helped bring the car to the last pre-landing straight line so as to avoid unnecessary
snakes and twists at the last moment, right before the ground.

Here is the airfield. By adding a little gas - God forbid, not to disperse at the last
moment a carefully set speed! - crawl the last obstacles on the very border of the
airfield. So. Good. Obstacles passed. Now we remove the gas of all four engines to the
stop. The steering wheel on itself - and the plane gently touches the wheels of the
earth.

At the very end of the run we drive up to Tupolev, who is still standing all
alone. While the car was in the air, he went to the place where, in his opinion, we
should have completed the post-landing run if we landed exactly at the beginning of
the airfield. And so it happened.

- Well, the old man is strong! - respectfully remarked our flight attendant. - I guessed
both times: both on take-off and on landing.

Guessed? It is unlikely ... The fact is that Tupolev showed the ability to "guess" like
this more than once or twice. He showed even in such purely non-standard cases that
did not have usual precedents, such as the take-off of an extremely overloaded plane
leaving for a record long-distance flight. That early summer morning, when ANT-25
Chkalova, Baidukova and Belyakova took off from the concrete path of an airfield
near Moscow, so that, flying over the North Pole, after 63 hours 16 minutes to land in
America, that morning among many who were trying to predict the place of
separation , only Tupolev correctly defined it.

In general, for the "guessed" typed a lot of coincidences.

It is not without reason that many legends about this property are so widely
circulated: how Tupolev, once looking at a plane of another constructor, in the eye,
without any calculations, determined in which place the structure “does not hold” -
and indeed, the plane is in this very place broken. And like another time, flipping
through a voluminous volume of aerodynamic calculations, which resulted in the
expected value of the maximum flight speed of a new car, Tupolev - of course, again
by sight - called another figure, which was confirmed when it came to flight tests. And
much more like that. They said that every employee of the Tupolev design bureau,
who managed to argue with the Chief in discussing some technical issue, immediately
received a bonus, promotion, or some other sign of encouragement.

I do not know what is true in these legends, and what is speculation (but by no means
fiction!). In any case, the very fact of their existence is symptomatic.

It is difficult to say which of the many ANT planes (as Tupolev's planes were
designated in the pre-war years) or “Tu” (this designation was adopted at the
beginning of the war) is “the best”. It is hardly possible to distribute aircraft, so to
speak, in descending order of merits. One car is stronger in one, the other in the
other. I don’t know if anyone asked Tupolev himself for this opinion. But I suspect
that if he had been asked a similar question, he would hardly have answered
him. Most likely, he would joke. Or, perhaps, he was silent - the benefit was able to do
this very expressively.

However, he could say - when he considered it necessary - he knew how to cut a

razor! To this day, the old-timers of the Tupolev Design Bureau remember how once
they together abused a certain person who occupied not the last post in aviation and
did something wrong. We worked on the signified face recklessly and verbose. And
when the eloquence of the participants in this informative interview began to dry up,
Tupolev, who had been silent before, said:

- The worst thing is the fool with the initiative.

The formula he expressed - a fool with initiative - took root. She is remembered,

quoted, operated on in disputes ... Yes, he could print with the exact word!

Sometimes it was abused ...

However, there was another way — an unexpectedly calm reaction in situations in

which, it would seem, it was impossible to expect from the Chief anything else than a
full portion of thunder and lightning.

In preparation for the first flight of a new experimental aircraft, a breakdown

occurred - the turbine of the auxiliary power unit fell apart. The breakdown, in
general, was minor, but it didn’t happen very much by the time - the flight delayed. In
the situation of increased nervousness that arose, as always in such cases, Tupolev
called his deputy L.M. Rodnyansky (who told me about the subsequent conversation),
who was responsible for the system, which included the ill-fated turbine, and asked:

- Tell me, did you get it or someone else? Maybe the design bureau in which the
turbine was ordered?

“No,” replied Rodnyansky, “I got it.”

- Exactly you? Maybe it seems to you in a rage that you, but really not you?

- No, Andrei Nikolaevich, I looked carefully. My guys and I did not think of it: we did
not take into account that the turbine seemed to be ordinary, and its working
conditions were new.

“Well then, it’s good that you screwed up.” And then, if someone else, it is not known
whether he knows how to correct his sins or not. Deal with him again ... You always
need to know who frayed.

It does not always turn out that Zeus only does that they throw thunder and lightning
on the bowed heads of subordinates. In any case, Zeus of the Tupolev caliber. Many
prominent aviation designers - A.A. Arkhangelsky, S.M. Eger, D.S. Markov,
V.M. Myasishchev, I.F. Nezval, V.M. Petlyakov, A.I. Putilov, P.O. Sukhoi,
A.M. Cheremukhin - for several years they worked in a team led by Tupolev, leading
brigades, each of which was engaged in a particular aircraft. But it is interesting that
in all the aircraft designed in different teams, Tupolev’s creative personality was
clearly felt. Whoever was his “right hand” when creating the next machine, and its
general appearance was the only one - Tupolev!

I was convinced of this for the first time a long time ago, when, flying a lot on a twin-
engine aircraft SB (ANT-40), I sat down for the first time at the helm of a four-engine
TB-7 (ANT-42).

The first of these machines was created under the leadership of Tupolev
A.A. Arkhangelsky, the second - the brigade V.M. Petlyakova. So, barely coming off
the ground on TB-7, I immediately felt its “family resemblance” to the
SB. Indisputable similarities in those many, although sometimes elusive, features of
stability and controllability, the totality of which is the face of a car for a pilot.

When, after landing, I shared my impressions of the striking similarities between the
SB and TB-7 with one of my colleagues, he replied:

“What were you waiting for?” Of course they are similar: they studied at the same
gymnasium!

Art historians, experts in old painting, tell us how difficult it can sometimes be to
establish with full authenticity the author of a picture painted several centuries
ago. Who created it: the master whose brushes ascribe it to, or one of his
students? Or, perhaps, the student wrote, and then the teacher walked it with his own
hand - did the very few strokes that distinguish an outstanding work from just a very
good one? .. Centuries pass, and it is difficult to establish this, almost
impossible. Signs of individual craftsmanship are drowning in the signs of the School.

Apparently, this happens not only in the visual arts.

And not necessarily - through the centuries.

He experienced a lot in his big - not just long, but just big - life of this man! He was
given happiness many, many times to see the real results of his affairs, but it was also
given to know the bitter aspects of life: human injustice, ingratitude, slander. Not in
vain, however, words were said that “a heavy glove, breaking glass, forges damask
steel”.

Andrei Nikolaevich Tupolev - both in technical creativity and simply in life - was
always stronger than any external circumstances.

He was damask.

***

In the second flight, we were finally convinced of the correct operation of all the
diverse equipment from which our "deuce" was woven, and made the first estimate of
fuel consumption in cruise modes in order to calculate how much gasoline would be
needed when driving the car to our main airfield.

The third flight - to Moscow.

In addition to the crew, there was a guest on board the aircraft in this flight: one of
the deputy chief designers. Upon learning that he was inscribed on our flight list, one
of the mechanics asked:

“What should he do on board?” The car is still not very flown around. It would be
better so far without superiors ...

To which, as they say, without blinking an eye, Arzhanov answered:

- He will represent the president to us. You know how in international

negotiations. Any questions?

There were no more questions.

When, after taking off, we made a farewell circle above the plant, brought the Tu-4
No. 00 - the "four" out of the gates of the assembly shop and dragged it onto the field,
where the "troika" had been brought up for several days. The series was in full swing.

Turning west, we lay on the course.

Probably, I flew this route dozens of times - on fighters, and on bombers, and on
transport aircraft. He flew at the helm and passenger, in fine weather and in the
“moor” - in a word, in every way. Now the impression of the flight is somehow mixed:
the speed is almost like a good fighter (a propeller engine, of course), and the general
situation is a spacious cabin, a large crew is bomber.

And besides, the notorious bent glass! Two glasses for looking ahead at the plant were
more or less picked up (the “replacing common sense” documentation worked in due
time!), But all the others through which I was now examining the area on either side
of the line of your path distorted pretty much. The problem of glazing the pressurized
cockpit, which was both solid and not distorting, was completely solved only on the
later types of aircraft, when they returned to the flat frontal glazing of the cockpit (in
this exact adherence to the B-29 model was not entirely successful). But at Tu-fourth
it was necessary all the time, as long as they existed, to look at the outside world as if
in an indispensable attraction of any culture and recreation park - the so-called
laughter room.

Closer to Moscow, the chatter intensified. We walked quite low, the weather was
windy and hot, sharp gusts of air followed one after another. And then we realized
what a pleasure it was to fly a Tu-4 into a dummy. Steering with helms and pedals
was almost continuous and with a fair amount of effort.

To top it all off, on my own initiative, the cab heating system started working. I don’t
know how it turned out that it turned on. Studying the ship, we, naturally, drew the
main attention to things that directly affect the flight of the machine: the control
system, power plant, landing gear, flaps, fire fighting equipment. As it turned out, our
erudition has not yet extended to heating the cabin. The winged saying “there are no
trifles in aviation” was obviously taken into account by us, but not to execution.
An attempt to turn to our guest’s consultation did not give any positive results
either. Damned heating did not obey the deputy chief designer, which, to the delight
of the entire crew, plunged him into considerable embarrassment.

The temperature in the cabin quickly approached the African.

“Nothing,” said Arzhanov, wiping his sweat, “it’s even useful: it improves the figure.”

I didn’t really care in those years about maintaining the proper harmony of the figure,
but it was good as a consolation.

At work, the flight time flashed quickly, and now we have in front of our native
airfield with a long concrete strip, which you can enter safely without sneaking up,
with a good reserve of speed. However, of the entire crew, this airfield was native to
only one person - the commander of the ship; for all others, arriving here means
arriving at guests. Unless, of course, you can call a stay at a place for months, almost
seven days a week, and for technicians it is almost round-the-clock hard work.

And the work has gone. True, our “deuce” - thank God, the factory and the design
bureau - behaved quite decently from the very beginning: some of the rooms, even
those not very angry, she gave out only at the curtain. But in general, she did not have
to complain about her character.

Gradually, I understood the habits of the aircraft. Of course, a professional test pilot
can board any car and fly it on its own, without any transportation with an
instructor. But in order to really understand all its features, moods, tastes (yes, yes,
tastes: what she loves and what she doesn't love!), It takes time, dozens or even
hundreds of flights are needed, you need the very pound of salt eaten though would
be with breakfast, which the pilots take with them, going into the air for several
hours.

And yet, almost the main thing that I learned to fly on the “Tu-fourth” was the ability
to work as part of a large crew.

It is not as easy as it might seem at first glance.

Having become the commander of such a crew, I unexpectedly ran into many
completely non-flight and non-technical problems.

So, one fine morning, somewhat embarrassed Arzhanov informed me:

- You see, what’s the matter - the third mechanic went into promotion.

- How is it - in promotion?

- Yes, he washed down! You see, I washed it down ... But nothing: we will put the
second mechanic instead of the third, and replace the second ...

And Nikolai Nikolaevich instantly drew such a harmonious system of internal crew
restructuring that it was possible to draw a single, self-evident conclusion - the
person of the third mechanic in the crew was simply not needed. Without it, it’s even
better.

In all such earthly affairs, I, the sinner, shamelessly transferred the lion's share of my
commanding functions to Arzhanov, mentally justifying myself by the fact that your
brave team consisted of his countrymen and, in the recent past, direct
subordinates. He, they say, and cards in his hands.

But in flight - there is no getting anywhere - you had to command: for good reason,
after all, in large multi-seat aircraft, the first pilot is called the commander of the
ship! This art (namely art) had to learn.

***

Start with at least using an aircraft intercom (SPU). The more people aboard, the
more reasons for talking, and at least a dozen people flew on the Tu-4, counting
together with experimental engineers. Any verbal slag like: “Ah, look, the cloud is just
like a hippo’s head!”, Or: “What is going on in the club in the evening?” - it was
managed to be eliminated quite quickly. But at the beginning there were much more
business negotiations than I had time to comprehend and “let through” myself.

But, in addition to internal communication, it was necessary (though with the help of
a flight attendant) to maintain radio communication with the ground, not to mention
the fact that it was necessary to drive the car: the post of the “unreleased” ship
commander - with the fulfillment of all the functions of a pilot sitting at the helm!

Sometimes I had to spin like a squirrel in a wheel.

By the way, what does it mean to work fast?

I received the first instructions on this seemingly obvious question from the
parachuting instructor Vinogradov, who let me out the first jump from an airplane
many years ago.

Now the first-time paratroopers are taken out on large transport planes, which are
quite easy to leave in the air: the paratrooper approaches the open door or hatch,
takes a step out - and that’s all! To do this, of course, we need to overcome some
internal psychological resistance: many millions of years ago, our ape-like ancestor,
having fallen off some kind of rock, laid the foundation for the formation of a strong
instinct in the whole human race, so to speak, respect for height.

But no special skills, no special skills are required to leave the plane through the
door. Another thing is the U-2, from which we once jumped. On it, the paratrooper
had to overcome the resistance of the oncoming air flow (after all, one hundred
kilometers per hour), get out of his seat, and then, grabbing his hands on the center
section, climb out onto the wing and settle with one foot on its trailing edge, and the
other on footboard, fortified from the bottom of the fuselage. It was necessary to
adapt to all these operations.
Vinogradov taught us this, holding a stopwatch in his hands. Seeing with what
disgustingly fussy, convulsive movements, taking successively the most ridiculous
poses that you can imagine, we perform this operation, he grimaced and uttered:

“Do you understand what it means to quickly get out of the cockpit onto the
wing?” This means: make slow movements, without breaks between them ...

Subsequently, I appreciated the universality of this recipe, which is far from suitable
for parachuting alone. It seems to me that it is difficult to give a better definition of
the difference between speed and fussiness.

Therefore, one should not believe the first impression if the actions of the pilot
controlling the aircraft seem from the side emphasized to be slow, unhurried, almost
lazy, unlike, say, the actions of a lady who is going to the theater in acute time
pressure. The slowness of the pilot is not the long-known classic Oblomov slowness,
stemming from the principle "never put off until tomorrow what can be put off until
the day after tomorrow." No, this is the working slowness of an experienced jeweler,
who knows what the cost of each of his careless movements can turn out, and with all
his professional experience he has learned seven times to measure before cutting off
once.

A very interesting point of view on this issue was expressed once in a conversation
with me by the Hero of the Soviet Union, Honored Test Pilot of the USSR Alexander
Aleksandrovich Shcherbakov, known for excellent work of this kind, such as, for
example, testing almost all existing supersonic fighters on a corkscrew. It would be
difficult to find a person more competent in the problem that interests us. So,
Alexander Alexandrovich said:

- This is a prejudice, as if the pilot should act instantly. I think a lot more trouble
came from the fact that the pilot was too hasty, took some action without thinking,
than from the fact that he delayed ...

In general, the pilot should not and cannot work out of time. He is obliged to
anticipate the forthcoming actions and try to do everything that can be done, or at
least prepare in advance.

When a soldier is building along the street or training ground, printing a step, the
commander manages it, clearly dividing each team into a preliminary and an
executive one, with a mandatory pause between them: “left”, “right”, “cru-
gom” . Otherwise, the soldiers will not have time to perceive the next command and
get ready for its clear, simultaneous execution.

The pilot must be able to sensitively capture in the external environment all of these -
not always, unfortunately, obvious ones - "on the side ...", "on the way ..." and
"cool ...". Otherwise, he will be late - not keep up with the pace of work,
unquestionably asked by the circumstances of the flight.

I think one of the reasons for the fatigue of flight labor is the need to fit into this given
rhythm throughout the flight.
The professional skills of the pilot, as, probably, in the representative of any other
profession, are involuntarily transferred to some extent by him in the off-duty living
environment, and - alas! - not always with indisputable benefit for oneself.

Even in the days of my flight youth, flying fighter jets that had a strictly limited fuel
supply but were not equipped with gas meters quickly taught me to carefully monitor
the time.

This need to always know what time it has been so eaten that I have acquired a strong
habit, wherever I am - on the street, at a meeting, in the theater, even at a party or
while walking - often glance at the clock. To this day, this often raises doubts about
my upbringing, but in those distant times, when the aforementioned evil-stricken
habit was barely developed, I had to listen to very vicious remarks in return for it,
like:

“I see you're in a hurry somewhere?” Maybe you're just bored with me ?!

No, not everything useful in the air is equally beneficial on earth!

***

As part of a large crew, it is essential not only to tell your subordinates, but also how
to say it.

In some ways, I deliberately violated the legal formulations of the aircraft talks.

So, instead of the grandiloquent “Crew, take off!”, I, like the majority of my
colleagues, by the way, almost always said before the start of the race: “Let's go!”

This has become generally accepted in aviation. Although some of the most consistent
supporters of statutory terminology used to reproach me for such, as it seemed to
them, profanation of the high terminology of our noble craft.

“What do you mean, let's go?” Are you a cabman or a car driver? And anyway, forever
you have any gags! Yesterday I flew back in a cap. God knows what!

Indeed, with the advent of enclosed cabins, I managed to fly in a cap with headphones
on top of it, since I did not see any good reason to pull my head with a tight
helmet. However, neither such logical arguments, nor even a reference to Kokkinaki,
who also often flew in a civilian headdress, did not help me.

“You're just a Voltairean,” my colleagues concluded. The word "nihilist" was not yet in
vogue then. Otherwise, they, of course, would have floated it.

I dislike the gorgeous phrase “Crew, take off!” Since I heard it once from the lips of a
pilot who worked only on light-engine aircraft and proudly uttered it proudly
addressing the “crew” consisting of ... one person.

But, of course, this was not the only and not the main reason.
The fact is that, in addition to, so to speak, the text with which the commander
addresses the crew, intonation is of great importance.

TU-FOUR TESTING CONTINUES

TU-FOUR TESTING CONTINUES

The parade has passed. Again began the so-called workdays. I say “so-called” because
these weekdays were by no means gray and monotonous. In any case, they presented
much more surprises than we would like.

The first serious incident at Tu-fourth was not long in coming.

Just a few days before, a “four” flew from the plant, piloted by test pilot
V.P. Marunov. But we barely had time to rejoice that there were already four of us,
when only three of us again became ...

It turned out so. Vasilchenko on the "troika" drove the site: the usual, quiet, innocent
site, not even at maximum engine operation. The readings of all instruments were in
full openwork.

Suddenly, this idyll was broken by a message from the aft compartment:

- Smoke and flame from under the hood of the third engine.

At first, no fire was visible either from the pilots or from the post of flight engineer:
the oncoming air stream carried the fire plume back. Nevertheless, the engine, of
course, was immediately turned off, the gas supply was shut off, the fire system was
launched - in a word, they took all measures to eliminate the fire.

The plane went down to its airfield from the far edge of the test area, where, as luck
would have it, it was caught by an accident.

- In the stern! How's it going? Asked Vasilchenko.

The answer was disappointing:

- The flame increases ... Tongue to the tail ...

To the tail - it's a good two dozen meters! You can’t say anything: a full-fledged fire ...

Another minute - and in SPU came the voice of flight engineer Nikolai Filizon:

- Now you see ...

The front of the engine, accessible to the flight engineer’s gaze, usually deeply
obscured by the hood surrounding it, glowed with a dark, burgundy red light, as if it
had just been cast from molten metal. The ship’s commander thought about many
tons of gasoline in the wing tanks, right behind the burning engine, and pictured how
all these tons (which is very likely) would explode, and, with a sigh, he gave the
command:

- Flight Engineer - depressurize the car. In the bow and stern cockpits - open the
hatch and door. To the whole crew - leave the plane!

And then, turning to the flight engineer, he cast a rather complicated glance at him,
the meaning of which, to put it in words, would sound something like this:

“In fact, you, Kolya, should jump ... Here in the near future, you can tear so that only
scattered molecules will remain from us ... But I myself will wait a bit ... And without
you I’m completely without hands ... I’m even this scoundrel - the third motor is not
really visible. Of course, see for yourself, but maybe ... "

And no matter how difficult it was to decipher the meaning of this view, Filison
understood everything at once. He did not say anything on SPU, so as not to
“introduce elements of the discussion” into the execution of the general command,
but when one of the neighbors preparing for the jump asked him:

- What are you doing? - briefly grunted in response:

- I won’t go anywhere ...

It was especially unpleasant to jump while in the aft cabin. Flames now raging with
might and main were licking the fuselage just in the place where the door was
located. The observing engineer, who was the first to stick to her, immediately
recoiled back: he had to jump right into the fire! ..

At such moments, in order to stop the general confusion, one is needed - at least
one! - a calm and decisive person, able to maintain complete clarity of thinking and
act not from “want”, but from “need”. One of the oldest (since the TsAGI flight test
department) staff members, flight engineer Vasily Yakovlevich Molochayev, who
performed the duties of an observer-experimenter in this flight, turned out to be such
a person in the aft cabin of the “troika”.

He removed the hesitant observer and resolutely jumped first himself.

A similar situation arose in the bow, but engineer D.F. Gordeev. Without thinking

twice (this expression had an absolutely exact meaning: there was no time to think for
a long time!), He bent his leg energetically, put his knee up, so to speak, on the body
of a man standing over the hatch and this, perhaps, not very saloon, but very an
effective method helped him leave the plane.

As expected, the flame did not have time to burn the jumpers: they were instantly
thrown back and forth in a stream.
Nine white parachute canopies blossomed in the air behind the tail of a fast-moving
airplane. Nine people for a long time - almost until their landing in the soft grass of
Prioksky meadows - watched the burning car. Now, not only the engine was burning -
the flame was thrown onto the wing, and a strip of thick black smoke stretching
behind the "three" was visible for tens of kilometers in a clear, blue sky.

It became obvious that the plane still did not have time to get to the airfield.

It was necessary to jump and the last two people left in it - Vasilchenko and
Filizon. But here again the same idea that invariably arises in such cases surfaced: it
would be impossible to establish any reliable cause of the accident from the wreckage
thrown by the crew and, of course, into the smoke of a crashed car. A plane worth
many millions will be lost, and, most importantly, it will be wasted ...

And they decided to land a burning ship. Plant in the field, with the landing gear
retracted. They tied tightly with belts to their seats, in advance - still in the air - they
opened the side hatch (so as not to be locked if the hatch jammed from deformation
when landing on the fuselage) and went to the landing ...

The land is getting closer and closer ... It’s already seen that the selected field is not so
perfectly flat as it seemed from above. But it’s too late to change the decision: every
extra second in the air can bring an explosion with you ... Vasilchenko smoothly
removes gas from three serviceable engines, gives a command to turn off the fire
hydrants and turn off the ignition, picks up the helm for himself ...

All! The machine is landed and, raising clouds of dust, plows the fuselage on the soft
soil of the flood meadow.

The cause of the fire was found. The huge risk that Alexander Grigoryevich
Vasilchenko and Nikolai Ilyich Filizon consciously took was justified.

***

And yet, despite the loss of the “troika”, the new ships soon became again four, and
then five, six, seven ... The series was in full swing, and the “Tu-fourths” arrived from
the factory one by one.

Again, as in the days of testing the first jet aircraft, the ability of a strong flight team
to isolate from its environment the right number of suitable people for any task was
confirmed.

True, this time the task was further complicated by the fact that not only pilots were
required (and not one, but two for each ship), but also onboard engineers, navigators,
and "flying" mechanics, and even some such specialists, which previously did not
exist at all, for example, onboard operators of radar installations. These operators
were sitting with their equipment in a small darkened compartment at the tail of the
aircraft, and it was from their lips that I first heard in flight unusual reports like:

- Ahead on the course at a distance of two hundred - a thunderstorm.

Or:

- Commander, we pass the Volga. Saratov remains thirty-five kilometers north.

Hearing such a message, I involuntarily wanted to look down, even when it was
impossible to see anything but continuous cloudy, impenetrable to the eye clouds.

Much has changed in the conditions of flight work of representatives of long-known,

traditional specialties in aviation. Some of them had to make new, significantly higher
than before, requirements. On the Tu-4, as well as on many subsequent types of
heavy ships, the visibility of the pilot is very limited. Of all the parts of the aircraft, he,
in fact, only sees that the socks of the two left engines with their screws.

It is easy to understand how the role of the feed observer in the crew has grown!

The real stern is the second pair of eyes of the commander. And the faster aircraft is
overtaking the car, and the changes that remain behind the tail of the weather (which,
however, will have to be returned on the return run), and, most importantly, what is
being done behind the engines (from the story of the fire on the "troika" it is obvious
how significant this is! ), how the wing, flaps, and tail behave - all this the commander
can “see” only with the eyes of the stern.

Stern should know what observations should be reported immediately, and when you
should first listen to the network and not interrupt the conversation on a topic more
important than his message (for this he must, among other things, be able to
correctly assess what is important and what is secondary) .

Even such a requirement, which would seem to be related more to acting skills, as a
good diction, is also presented, especially in acute situations, to a good fodder!

I have happened at different times and on different ships to fly with such excellent
stern observers as Grigory Grigoryevich Irlyanov, Boris Alexandrovich Balyshev,
Sergey Alexandrovich Sokolov. At one time, engineer Vladlen Semenovich Kuzovlev
flew in the stern of a plane I controlled. The machine we tested then was new,
experienced, with four - also experienced - jet engines. It is easy to imagine what a
great value in such conditions was represented by a qualified engineer specializing in
engines in the aft cabin! Here the "second eyes" were even more useful than if the
"first" ones were in their place.

The great thing is reliable feed!

Nevertheless, it was even more significant to select reliable commanders for each of
the incoming Tu-Fours. And such were found. Soon, new Tu-4 ships B.G. Govorov,
A.P. Yakimov, S.F. Mashkovsky, F.F. Opadchiy, V.V. Ponomarenko, A.D. Flight
I.Sh. Vagapov, M.V. Relatives ...

After reading the list of names just written (not the first and far from the last in this
book), I thought that another reader would probably skip it and leave it outside his
consciousness as a kind of foreign body that violates the normal course of the story. I
don’t know, maybe it is so. But I cannot do without such lists. And I beg the reader:
please do not run them through a hasty, indifferent look! Stop at each of these
names! Behind her is a glorious, militant, difficult biography of an outstanding
person, a real aviator, a patriot of his homeland and his only life-long business.

Do not miss these names, comrades!

... The ships flew. And in the mass of successful flights, in full accordance with the
implacable laws of statistics, various “cases” began to penetrate.

In this sense, the turn has reached our "deuce."

According to the assignment, we had to gain the maximum height that day — the
ceiling, and then, without decreasing gas, decrease with acceleration by three to four
hundred meters and drive the horizontal platform at maximum speed. There was
much more to be written in the assignment, but this time we no longer had to carry
out everything subsequent.

We reached the ceiling safely.

“It seems it’s not climbing anymore,” said Arzhanov.

“Yes,” I confirmed, “we drove down.” - And, having pressed the steering wheel away
from himself, he crossed the plane, as it were, through the top of an invisible
mountain. The machine willingly - much more willingly than climbing the last
hundred meters upwards - rained down, gathering speed, to the ground.

But barely ten to fifteen seconds of acceleration passed, as a measured, familiar noise
of engines running at full throttle mixed in a new sound - piercing, high-pitched,
nasty, sharply increasing with every moment. The arrow counter of the fourth
engine’s revolutions took off and briskly ran along the dial: 2450 ... 2500 (this is the
maximum permissible speed!) ... 3000 ... 3500 ...

The last digit on the scale of the rev counter - 4500 revolutions per minute - was just
as quickly left behind, after which the infuriated arrow buried itself at point blank
range, although by rumor the revolutions continued to grow ...

Screw promotion! The thing is very unpleasant: now the bearings will be peddling,
and then it will be clear what will happen to the motor earlier - it will fall apart or
light up.

The cleaned gas, the shut off gas supply, the ignition switched off did not help in the
least degree. I, as much as I could vigorously, pulled the steering wheel toward me to
reduce speed, but the screw continued to yell as if it had been stabbed.

Worst of all, for some reason we did not obey the feathering system, specially created
for such cases when it is necessary to forcibly rotate the propeller blades along the
stream and thus stop its rotation in the air. This is now just what was needed more
than anything else in the world! But the red button with the inscription "weather vane
4" did not respond to repeated clicks, as if everything that was happening did not
concern it in the least.
In the headphones of the headset came the voice of stern Irlyanov:

- From the nozzles of the fourth engine comes a thick smoke ...

All clear. It is in a motor that is not adapted for rotation at such an insane speed, oil
burns.

We meaningfully, sadly exchanged glances with Arzhanov, and I gave Irlyanov a

neutral answer, by no means pretending to any specific analysis of events, according
to SPU:

- Good. I understand you - smoke from the fourth. Keep watching.

- There is. I'm watching.

You can’t slow down anymore - we just do not have enough to top it all and fall into a
tailspin on a heavy non-maneuverable ship.

And the screw continues to howl!

All that could be done, we did. One thing remains: to decline, continuing almost
hopeless attempts to drive the untwisted screw into the vane position. Suddenly
change anger to mercy and obey?

And he obeyed!

I don’t know with what - the twentieth or thirtieth - attempts, but I obeyed. This was
just in time, since reports began to come from the stern no longer about smoke, but
about the flames and some objects flying out of the exhaust pipes of the poor
engine. What Irlyanov delicately called "some objects" was - there was no doubt left
here - pieces of pistons, rings, valves, which we then missed when disassembling the
engine on the ground.

But now, in flight, the engine finally stopped. The culprits of the disaster - four huge
propeller blades - froze in an unaccustomed stillness in the field of view of the right
window.

So on three engines (in comparison with the just-completed “circus” it seemed like a
trifle), we returned home and made a landing.

“I wonder what would happen if the weather vane didn't work?” - asked me one of the
engineers - representatives of the motor company.

I regarded this interest as unconditionally unhealthy, especially since I couldn’t

express myself on the topic touched upon.

Life itself gave the answer for me.

Two weeks later, the promotion was repeated on another ship - at Marunov, but such
an evil promotion that after several minutes of unsuccessful attempts to drive the
screw into the vane position, he ... flew away! So directly - he broke away from the
engine and flew away, and he did it relatively successfully: he barely hit the wing and
hood of the neighboring engine. But what matters he could have done! .. How could it
not be said again: “Lucky!” However, there was already a conversation on the subject
of luck.

***

We were left with one of the last points of the “two” flight test program: the long-
distance (by that time, of course) non-stop flight Moscow - Crimea - Moscow.

Now that high-speed jets have drastically brought us not only the Crimea or the
Caucasus, but even the Far East, our then flight clearly “doesn’t sound”.

But at that time - it was fall of the forty-seventh year - to fly out of Moscow after
breakfast, look at the Black Sea and return back by dinner, it looked pretty
impressive.

At the same time, the “four” left on a different route, towards the Urals.

Taking off, we broke through the thick clouds, climbed to the desired height, set the
desired operation mode of the motors and headed south.

Deep down - somewhere halfway between us in the ground - in rows of neat small
lambs lay a flat layered cloud.

After some time, some light shadows, like feathers, fell on it — we, moving forward,
went under a canopy of a translucent mesh of cirrus clouds that covered the entire
southern half of the sky.

Gradually, the clouds - both lower and upper - became denser, from silver-pearl steel
snow-white, and then gray and steadily converging. Everything was already being
made a corridor between them. A few minutes of flight in a cloudy drizzle, and the
clouds closed. Blind instrument flight began.

Just in case, I asked the navigator:

- What is the temperature overboard?

- Minus seventeen.

This answer meant that we don’t have to be particularly afraid of icing: it is most
likely at temperatures from zero to minus seven, from strength - ten degrees; in
colder air, it rarely occurs.

Seldom. But arises! In the next few minutes, we began to see this.

A layer of drizzle on the bent glass of the cabin froze - stopped crawling along the air
stream. There could be no doubt; drizzle turned into ice. This did not arouse much
enthusiasm in us, if only because we had not yet managed to establish the means to
combat icing on the first copies of the Tu-4, including our “deuce”.

But ice on the cockpit glazing is not so bad.

It was worse that the icing of the leading edges of the wings began. This threatened
not only with an increase in the weight of the ship, but also with a violation of its
aerodynamic qualities. And indeed, despite the unchanged mode of operation of the
motors, the arrow of the speed indicator moved slowly and crawled to the left.

The ice was growing. Hundreds of extra kilos of weight piled on us pulled the car
down.

Because of the ice that has grown on the rudders and ailerons, it became difficult to
operate the helm.

The shaking began - the ice crust sticked unevenly to the rapidly rotating propeller
blades, the same blades that are carefully balanced - literally to grams - before being
installed on the plane. Now what kind of balancing is there! Powerful centrifugal
forces continually tear off pieces of ice from the blades and echo them on the fuselage
with an echo like an empty barrel.

Minutes go by, and it becomes clear that it will not be possible to verify the fuel
consumption in this flight under the classical conditions of a precisely specified
mode. Maybe it’s wiser not to burn gasoline in vain, but to turn around, until it’s too
late, to the opposite course - to the house in order to repeat the planned flight on
another day, in more favorable weather? Frankly, I really didn’t want this: after all,
we were the first to be entrusted with estimating the range of the new ship. It was a
pity to miss such an opportunity ...

Finally (this probably should have been done earlier) I ordered the radio operator to
report on the situation to our airdrome and ask for instructions on how to proceed.

The answer of the earth was born, apparently, not without debate. In any case, he did
not immediately follow.

And the ice continued to build up. This circumstance noticeably fueled the impatience
of the entire crew. By the end of the third minute of waiting, someone from the stern
frowned with disapproval:

- Well, are they there, fell asleep, or what?

What was followed by the reasonable remark of Arzhanov:

- Do not rush. The boss is thinking ...

What the authorities finally came up with was a bit vague:

- Continue flying along the route. Act according to circumstances, at our sole

discretion.
Somewhere I read that in the fleet the officer’s cap shifted forward on the nose
represents a signal "publicly displeased with the authorities" that is being made
public. I could not give such a signal just because I was wearing a helmet and not a
cap.

But, with a little thought in his brains, he still saw a certain reason in the decision of
the authorities: the ship is already in the air, today is somehow lost, so it makes sense
to extract from it at least what is possible, for example, to estimate the Tu-4 flight
range in extremely unfavorable conditions . In the end, these ships will not always fly
in the ideal laboratory environment of the test zone! No, they definitely gave us the
right command!

And I began to "act on my own."

The first attempt - to get out of the icing up - immediately suffered a decisive
fiasco. Even with all four engines running at full throttle, the heavy and lost
nobleness of their outlines machine did not want to gain altitude.

I had to reduce the gas to medium and go down, the benefit of this option was
perceived by the plane with obvious pleasure: it “poured” down so willingly that the
altimeter needle only flickered, counting the revolutions!

And only having lost a good three kilometers in height, we heard the long-awaited
message of the navigator:

- Outside, plus ...

In wet clouds, ice quickly melted. One by one, his pieces fell off from ours - I almost
wrote: with a sigh of relief - a machine. A wet layer of drizzle came to life and crawled
on the glass.

And after another fifteen to twenty minutes, tears began to appear in the
clouds. True, neither land nor sky was visible through them, but only other layers of
the same clouds, but compared to the flight conditions from which we had just
climbed out, this was already quite acceptable.

Around us, like rocks, stood (just stood - their height significantly exceeded the
width) powerful, dense, solemn cumulus clouds of infinitely varied shades. Varied,
despite the fact that all these shades, like in black and white cinema, were a
combination of only two colors: from sugar white to dark dark gray, almost black, it
seemed that did not reflect any of the rays incident on it the sun.

Our plane was slowly rising — it was necessary to use the opportunity to return to a
predetermined height — making its way like a traveler in a mountain gorge, in
narrow, winding corridors between cloudy walls. The materiality of these walls is
such that it seemed to hind their wing, and it will fly off, as if from an impact on a
rock.

Suddenly a blue scrap of tear flashed above us. The rays of the sun burst into the
gloomy catacombs of the clouds. And everything around, without changing its color,
suddenly became matte, sparkling, shining, brilliant, as if the light had not fallen on
the clouds from the outside, but flared up from its own, with the power of a million
candles, a source hidden in the thickness of each of them.

A few more minutes - and we broke into the clear sky. A powerful cloud front is left
behind.

Again there was a colorful world around us. At first, it seemed even a little redundant,
excessive, a little tasteless.

However, aesthetics were aesthetics, and flying in a clear sky was easier than in
moore. The machine itself, almost without requiring the intervention of a pilot, sailed
on its legitimate mode recorded in our flight mission. The crew remained lazy to
glance at the readings of the instruments and from time to time fill in the next graphs
of tablets.

***

The first half of the flight was drawing to a close.

Below us, the velvet season was in full swing - Crimea was lying in a hot haze.

I got involved in external communications and transmitted to the command radio

station the turning point of our route that I was above them, please fix the span. And
immediately I heard in a naval clear, friendly answer:

- We see you. Greetings. We wish you a happy return trip.

I looked down at the place where my interlocutor was invisible from a height of six
kilometers, and I saw a picture of its kind, remarkable.

Three waters were beneath me!

Three different, dissimilar waters. To the south - towards the outlines of the
Anatolian Highlands that are obscurely visible in the haze - stretched dark green off
the coast and even more darkened over the depths of the Black Sea. To the north of
the isthmus went a muddy-yellow sandy-colored Azov shallow water. And between
the eastern coast of the eye and the thin, hardly distinguishable from the height of the
Arabat arrow, malachite-green water of Sivash stood out as a bright ribbon. Three
different waters ...

No, it’s good that the world is colorful! ..

The plane lies in a deep U-turn. Both the Crimea and the multi-colored waters
washing it slowly revolve around the end of our left wing. The navigator, having
conjured over a navigational ruler, calls a two-digit figure - our return course.

And here we go with this course. The outlines of the cloud masses are far ahead -
unfortunately, the malicious front, which made our flight to the south so complicated,
could not go anywhere. Have to cross it again.
From a distance, the frontal cloudiness has a completely innocent appearance -
something like a giant portion of whipped cream. But we are already scientists - we
know what is being done inside these “creams”! I definitely do not want to get into
them. And the top edge of the clouds is much higher than us. We have to go around
the front on horseback (we were ordered to act "at our discretion, according to
circumstances"). And I transferred the plane to climb.

Seven thousand meters ... Eight ... Nine ...

Only at ten and a half kilometers the uneven contours of the upper edge of the clouds
began to project in front of us exactly on the horizon - we finally reached their
height. And I must say, we left on time: the front was already under us.

"Two" was above the clouds. From time to time she even burst into individual tops
bulging towards the sky, and then, startled, as if brushing herself off, she again
jumped out. A shadow of an airplane in a rainbow rim ran before us, now falling
down a hundred to two hundred meters, then approaching and even merging with us.

Thinking about what was going on inside the immense cloud mass supporting us, I
allowed myself to grunt with satisfaction: we fly, they say, above all weather and do
not blow into our mustache. This time we seem to have outwitted her!

In other words, I fell into a frivolous complacency, and a fair fate made sure that it
was worthy and punished without delay. It was not difficult to do this to fate, since
the list of possible troubles in the air is not limited to bad weather alone.

Suddenly, our ship abruptly, as if someone had grabbed it by the end of the wing,
pulled to the right. To counter this incomprehensible, and therefore especially
alarming U-turn, I energetically pressed the left rudder pedal. Where there! The
whole strength of my leg was not enough.

- Pilots, what about the course? - the navigator asked displeasedly, turning to us.

Having answered him only with a not very affectionate look, I threw Arzhanova:
“Help to keep the car,” and began to hastily turn the helm of the rudder trimmer to
the left. So the three of us - the trimmer, Arzhanov and I - we finally stopped further
throwing the ship off course.

But what's the matter anyway? Who is pulling our plane aside with such force?

First thought: the extreme motor failed. But no, and according to the testimony of
devices and by ear, all the motors are working properly.

Is it really something with control? My memory is still fresh last year’s story on the
MiG-Ninth, when my stabilizer and elevator were deformed and destroyed in
flight. Maybe now something similar happened with the keel and rudder?

- The crew to inspect the visible parts of the ship.

But I barely had time to give this command when Bespalov’s protracted, clearly
annoyed voice came to SPU:

“There he is, son of a bitch!”

The detailed comments of the flight engineer regarding the unacceptable actions of
the mysterious son of a bitch were interrupted by my question:

- Okay, Porfirich, then tell me ... And now I ask plainly: who and why - son of a bitch?

The son of a bitch (or rather bitch children) turned out to be the flaps of the hood of
the fourth engine - metal petals that regulate the air flow through the hood. They
spontaneously completely opened and stuck out, like a shiny, beautiful, but acting,
like a strong brake, nimbus around the nacelle. Subsequently, on the ground, it
turned out that this happened due to an accidental shorting in the toggle control
switch: its chips that had not been removed at the factory in a timely manner got into
its contacts. No wonder they say that in all electrical engineering, electronics, radio,
television, radar, there are only two possible defects: the lack of contact when it is
needed, and the presence of contact when it is not needed. We had to face the last
defect.

However, he did a fair amount of trouble: not only did the car barely manage to keep
from a spontaneous turn, the stall of the flow from the widened wings caused the tail
to shake, and most importantly, under the influence of such a powerful brake, the
flight speed dropped significantly. The ship began to sink heavily into the front clouds
swirling beneath us. I had to switch the engines to full throttle again. Again, nothing
was left of the flight mode given to us: neither altitude, nor speed, nor even the
characteristics of the propeller group's work! What can you do? The circumstances,
according to which we were ordered to act, were stubbornly developing against us!

But the stream of trouble did not end there. As soon as the speed stopped falling and
even began to slowly, crawling - kilometer by kilometer - increase, as the plane
flinched, pecked its nose slightly and ... again began to slow down its already god
knows what rapid movement forward.

What a curse! What else happened there? Isn't it a bit "sudden" for one flight?

This time, I did not have to think about the causes of the next trouble for a long time:
both the pilots and the navigator on the dashboards lit the warning lights “Hatches
are open”.

All attempts of the navigator to close them were unsuccessful: apparently the chain
was somewhere closed to the opening.

By time, the thunderstorm front was about to end. It remained to stretch quite a
bit. And the long-suffering "deuce" pulled. At the minimum permissible speed, with
engines roaring at full throttle, bristling at the wrong time with the engine shutters
and hatch protruding around the open belly, then burrowing into the restless cloudy
tops, then straining to crawl out willows, but pulled! Arzhanov and I were sitting in
some strange, unusual postures, turning the pedals and turning the steering wheels to
failure, and waited for it to finally come down. It seemed that it was not the car that
was carrying us in the sky, but ourselves, with the muscles of our own hands, we were
holding her back from what she - out of sheer foolishness - wanted to do: fall into the
depths of the clouds, into a destructive chatter, icing, electric discharges.

The top edge of the clouds, as if desperate to swallow us, began to gently go down at
the very moment when it became clear that it was impossible to hold the height
anymore. However, this feeling is deceptive: if the front began to melt ten, twenty,
fifty, one hundred kilometers further, be calm, if these kilometers would pass without
decreasing!

But somehow cloudy - thanks to her! - finally began to leave from under us: the front
line ended. We cleaned the gas and rolled down, as if on a slide from a huge, ten-
kilometer invisible mountain.

***

Again we - for the umpteenth time this day - at a given altitude and a given flight
speed. We continue unsuccessful attempts to close the motor and hatches. On-board
electrician Losev makes a proposal:

- Commander! Let me climb into the bomb bay and see if there is a jam in the limit
switches ...

Thinking a little, I asked:

- Do you have anything to attach there? Any rope or rope?

- Yes, commander. Hefty rope.

- Okay. We depressurize the car, open the exit from your cockpit to the bomb hatch
without removing it - look! - parachute, tie a rope and climb slowly. To the feed
mechanic, wrap the rope around the rack and choose the slack all the time.

And well done electrician, tied up with a rope, climbed into the open bomb
bay! Imagine what this means: a compartment the size of a good room differs from it
primarily in that ... it has no floor! More precisely, his "gender" now, having been
divided into two halves, the whole has opened out. Under the feet of a man slowly
making his way to the wall along the remaining narrow cornice, there is a many-
kilometer void, behind which, somewhere deep down in a translucent haze, lies the
earth. It’s hard to go - a raging air vortex strives to tear the daredevil away from small
rails, corners and cutouts in the structure for which he clings. A heavy parachute is
pulling back ... It’s good, of course, that it is there, but I still don’t really want to break
away and fly down! One thing is a training jump. There you tune in to him in
advance, and there are two parachutes: the main and the spare,

Finally, the limit switches are inspected and ... found in good condition. The reason is
not in them.

She found out only after landing, this reason.

Literally on the eve of departure, a Varangian, a specialist in radar, was put on our
ship. At first, I instinctively opposed: any changes in the crew before a responsible
flight are perceived by pilots without much enthusiasm. But this first and, as later
showed, completely correct reaction turned out to be insufficiently persistent.

They convinced me. I was told that the operator of the radar installation is a great
specialist in their field and will probably be useful in a long-haul flight; besides, he
will quietly sit in the compartment allotted to him and touch nothing but special
radar equipment. It was difficult to object, and there was simply no time - I repeat:
there was one night left before departure. And I lost sight of the fact that in the
operator compartment, which was discussed, among the dozens of buttons and toggle
switches there is one - just one! - Related not only to location equipment.

It was, as the reader probably already guessed, the toggle-switch for opening the
hatches of the bomb bay!

Unaccustomed to long flights, especially in the atmosphere, sometimes very

turbulent, the operator felt far from brilliant. And, turning inside out in his cramped,
dark closet, he himself did not notice how he hit the ill-fated toggle switch ...

How many lessons I got right away!

One must be impenetrable unyielding, in any case, in all that relates to flights.

It is necessary to carefully instruct and prepare for the performance of the tasks of
each crew member individually, because it is never possible to overestimate how
much a single person can spoil in flight, even with the impeccable work of the rest of
the crew.

It is necessary to know in detail not only your workplace, but also the workplaces of
all your satellites.

It is necessary to be actively interested in their well-being, without waiting for their

own recognition of the "suffering."

Much more is needed to be a true, full-fledged, impeccable commander of a ship ...

The flight of the "four", committed on the same day, was much more successful. And
the weather east of Moscow turned out to be better than south. And the technique did
not bring any surprises. It is not surprising that the results were different.

“In essence, your flight is in some ways very useful,” Max Arkadievich Taits delicately
told me, who directed the processing and analysis of the results of these tests. - From
it we can judge what the range of the “Fourth” will be in the most adverse
conditions. Worse than you, they are unlikely to have anyone.

I really wanted to believe it. Otherwise, what was the point of continuing the flight
after we, without anti-icers, got into intensive icing?

***
A few days after the flight Moscow - Crimea - Moscow, the test program for the
"deuce" was completed, and we handed over the ship - overtaking in this matter, to
the pure pleasure of the entire crew, which had before us a fair handicap "unit" - into
the hands of customers.

After a farewell, rather modest dinner (there were still card times), the entire freed
crew left for their home, to the factory.

All except the commander.

But in a very short time he followed in the same direction. It turned out that by the
time the "two" trials were completed, the last ship of the experimental series - the
"twenty" had not yet left the factory slipways. On it, I was unexpectedly appointed
commander, however, as part of a different crew.

The soul of this crew was a person well known to me on the ground and in the air -
the leading engineer D.I. Cantor.

He came to our team right from the university bench in the spring of the forty-first
year and during the war he grew into one of the strongest specialists in his
field. David Isaakovich worked especially hard and fruitfully on flight tests and fine-
tuning of propellers, in particular weathervanes, which at that time were a novelty
that was extremely necessary for our aviation.

As befits a newborn, at first the weathercocks were pretty capricious. It happened

more than once that the screw categorically did not want to enter the weather
position or, upon entering, refused to leave it.

Once - it was on an IL-4 twin-engine aircraft - I, together with David Isaakovich, had
a chance to test a screw that behaved in a very indecent way: its blades began to be in
such an intermediate position that it was impossible to give gas to the motor (for this,
the rotational speed of the screw turned out to be insufficient) and to continue
without a reduction flight on the second engine also did not work (for this the speed
was excessive).

In addition, the villain screw gave such strong resistance that there was not enough
power to keep the plane from turning. In the air, describing a smooth curve for
approaching an emergency landing, I still somehow managed to cope with this,
turning up the rudder trimmer to failure. But before landing, the trimmer had to be
returned to a neutral position. Otherwise, after the gas was cleaned, a serviceable
motor above the ground would just as energetically be thrown in a turn in the
opposite direction, and then an accident (in the middle of our own airfield!) Could
not be avoided.

I had no choice but to take the path of unscrupulous exploitation of a leading

engineer, this time not as a representative of a “brain trust”, but as an owner of brute
physical strength.

- Press, Dodik, on the left pedal, as soon as you can! I asked.

And he pressed.

I felt this immediately from the instantly reduced load on my left leg trembling with
tension. Landing turned out successful.

A knowledgeable engineer and well-developed common sense engineer, an energetic

organizer, a man of extremely high working capacity - and working capacity of some
kind of light, fun, absolutely not "sacrificial" - Kantor was (and has remained to this
day) a welcome participant in any of the most difficult work.

He is no less desirable in any company on vacation: lively, very mobile (despite the
already noticeable fullness in those years), a recognized “laureate” in dances of all
kinds. However, Kantor soon became a real - without quotes - laureate for his merits,
as you can easily guess, by no means a choreographic plan.

To top it all off, David was a purely, I would say, kind of contagious optimist from a
young age. In subsequent years, this property, unfortunately, was very necessary for
him.

The second pilot in the “twenty” was appointed one of our first reactivists, Yakov
Ilyich Bernikov. Before landing on the “Fourth”, he managed to work as a tester for
about three years, but he did not fly on heavy multi-engine aircraft. In this sense, the
test of the “twenty” was for him a bit of a debut in a new role. Subsequently, Bernikov
- with the light hand of our “twenty” - became one of the most prominent testers of
aircraft of all classes, including heavy ones, such as, for example, the well-known
turboprop four-engine passenger ship An-10.

Often you hear how about pilots, even test pilots, they say: "This is a fighter, and this
is a bomber."

In my deep conviction, such a classification is very arbitrary and, in any case, very
unstable.

Of course, almost every pilot has his own personal sympathies for small or,
conversely, large aircraft. But it is one thing to love, and another to be able. Love
whatever you want, but to be able to fly on any aircraft - an airplane, a helicopter, a
glider - a real tester is required.

In the entire company of “homegrown” TsAGI pilots, our first test art teacher Ivan
Frolovich Kozlov — thanks to him and for this — persistently instilled universalism
from the very beginning. I remember how, at one time, on his instructions, I did two
jobs in parallel: one on a miniature, "as on an awl" with a nimble, flight training
single UT-1, and the second on a heavy, four-engine TB-3 bomber. There were days
when it was necessary to fly across, changing from one of these planes to another and
back. In the future, almost any car that fell into my hands ended up somewhere in a
fork between the well-developed UT-1 and TB-3.

The question may arise: is such a versatility necessary? Wouldn’t it be easier, cheaper,

finally, more reliable to prepare pilots for aircraft of a certain class, without spending
time, money and energy to master everything that is not inherent in this class?
No, in a test case, universality is indispensable! No wonder it is considered one of the
most important elements of the flight test culture.

Firstly, when testing and fine-tuning aircraft of one class, a lot of useful things can be
brought into them from experience working with machines of another class. So, when
shortly after the war fighter-interceptors took another step in their development -
flew in extremely difficult meteorological conditions - a lot of things in the
methodology of using their equipment, building a flight profile, and interacting with
ground-based radio equipment were borrowed from the practice of flying on bombers
and transport aircraft . Who, if not a test pilot flying "on anything", can carry out such
a transfer of experience?

Secondly, many design bureaus and factories make aircraft of different classes,
tonnages and destinations. Do not keep special pilots for each of them.

Finally, it sometimes happens that universality is played out in the most unexpected
way due to the specifics of the test flights themselves.

Hero of the Soviet Union Valentin Fedorovich Kovalev experienced a heavy jet
passenger plane at very insidious modes - near the minimum speed. These were,
frankly, quite risky flights. Therefore, the crew, consisting of only two people,
performed them on a local aircraft: two test pilots who worked for themselves, and
for the flight engineer, and for the navigator, and for the radio operator.

“But it wasn’t necessary for the stewardess: there were no passengers,” Kovalev
specified.

Indeed, instead of passengers, a huge cabin was loaded with metal ingots: the flight
weight had to be full.

Having set the initial speed, Kovalev turned on the recorders and, after waiting a few
seconds, pulled - sometimes smoothly, sometimes energetically - he steered over
himself, as if rearing a car.

At first it seemed that the plane was more or less condescending to such
unceremonious handling of itself. He trembled, swung from wing to wing, and then,
of course, fell down, but did all this rather sluggishly, so that the pilots managed to
regain control, not allowing the machine to go beyond the limits of its permissible
positions in space.

This was repeated once, two, three, five ... And suddenly, with some sort of
unfavorable combination of the initial parameters of the regime - speed, altitude,
pace of the helm deviation - a huge airliner, flickering the ends of the wings spaced
tens of meters away, energetically ... rolled onto its back!

The first natural movement of the pilots - to turn the helm in the opposite direction -
turned out to be completely inconclusive: the ship did not obey the ailerons. Another
moment - and the car will go into an uncontrollable fall with its back down, from
which it is generally not known whether it can be brought to its normal position.
And then Kovalev instantly realized: it was necessary to make a flip through the wing
- a figure, the first half of which the plane, in essence, had already completed on its
own.

The realization of this only possible way to salvation — aerobatics on an unmanned

aircraft — of course, required great calm and excellent command of the car. Every
second, it was necessary to meter the deviations of the helm very precisely so that the
speed did not accelerate above the maximum permissible, and not destroy the car in
the air with too sharp a withdrawal from the figure, and have time to finish this
conclusion before touching the ground - in a word, it was not easy!

And it is unlikely that Kovalev would have handled all this so well if he had not
owned, except for heavy aircraft, fighters, including the art of aerobatics. In other
words - if it were not for the generalist.

Most of our most prominent testers are generalists.

Many of them, widely known as testers of heavy ships, began with fighters. These are
V.K. Kokkinaki, Y.I. Bernikov, A.P. Yakimov.

The opposite happens less often. But it does happen. When the military pilot bomber
P.F. Mushtaev, he immediately declared his desire to fly “on everything”, including
fighter jets. The authorities were skeptical:

- What are you, Pavel Fomich! You and Godkov are closer to forty than thirty, and
God didn’t offend you with complexion, it’s a bit late for fighters ...

They didn’t give it. And, as further showed, they did not give in vain.

Having returned to the system at the very beginning of the war, Mushtaev kept silent
about the fact that he hadn’t flown a fighter in his life, and was appointed ... the
commander of a newly formed fighter aviation regiment.

He went through the entire war at the head of this regiment, flying confidently on his
Yak, as all his fellow soldiers, as well as many enemy pilots, especially those eight
whom he shot down personally, not counting destroyed by him in group battles, could
be convinced of. So much for "late on the fighters."

It seems that a flight biography has also developed with the famous American test
pilot Bridgman, whose very interesting notes “Alone in the Endless Sky” were
published in our Russian translation.

Bridgman fought on a heavy bomber, after the war he flew a twin-engine passenger
plane, and then, having switched to test work, he became widely known for his
excellent flights on a single-seat experimental rocket aircraft Skyrocket, in which it
reached speeds unprecedented at that time - almost at twice the speed of sound.

The Basketman was right. Test pilot must be able to fly everything!

***
And here I am again at the same factory, where about a year ago I was preparing to fly
to Tu-4 No. 002.

Everything is familiar, but at the same time new.

First of all, the fact that I now have not only colleagues or acquaintances, but also real
friends with whom we have done a lot of work together: many hours spent in the air
aboard the deuce, and some particularly memorable piece minutes from this
watch. Such things are not forgotten soon.

Now I'm at the factory.

ABOUT DARKNESS, RISK, TIME AND

MUCH OTHER
ABOUT DARKNESS, RISK, TIME AND MUCH OTHER

The mission mission was received. The navigator Vasily Lebedev and I left the
regiment commander's dugout and went along our trodden path in the forest to our
squadron.

I don’t know if there was at least one more aviation unit based in the forest on the
entire front - from the Barents to the Black Sea. Not at the edge, and not in a forest
glade, but in the most that neither is more often dense coniferous forest.

To get to our parking lot after landing, we had to drive a good half a kilometer
carefully along the winding forest road lined with logs. The spreading branches of
pine trees that closed above it made it completely invisible from above. Therefore, our
regiment did not suffer losses on the ground from enemy aircraft raids. She was given
the full opportunity to bomb - and as much as she wants - to bomb and storm any tin-
plywood props, seductively placed along the edge of the airfield along the edge of the
forest. And at that time we calmly went about our business, right up to the
preparation of an immediate return visit to them just frolic over the Nazi aircraft just
frolic over our airdrome.

But now we have got another task. Regiment Commander Major G.A. Chuchev

ordered our squadron to bomb the trains with ammunition and military equipment of
the enemy at one of the stations of the Rzhev-Velikiye Luki railway.

He recalled (although he might not have done this: such things themselves are well
remembered) that the station was heavily covered by anti-aircraft artillery and that
patrolling enemy fighters was very likely over it. So we should keep our ears open.

In his fluffy fur hat and leather coat with buttoned-up collars, Chuchev looked more
like not the commander of a combat regiment of diving bombers, but like the director
of a factory or the head of an institution that gives its employees orders of a purely
economic nature. However, this similarity stemmed, probably, from his manner of
talking with his subordinates, even when giving a combat order, in a calm,
emphasized business tone, with an invariable detailed analysis of all the details that
could complicate the task, or, conversely, contribute to it.

And this time, only having discussed all the details, Chuchev pushed aside the staff
card, painted with multi-colored pencils, and in the same steady, calm voice he
finished his speech with the order:

- bombard!

When I, having arrived at the front, for the first time I heard from his mouth this
word - to bombard - I remember, it seemed to me somehow archaic-
pretentious. Associations arose with ancient cannons, decorated with curly casting,
with round cores, with smoking wicks, even with the military rank of Peter the Great -
“Mr. Scorer”. But I myself could not come up with any other more suitable word: “to
bomb” - it sounded convenient, but it was somewhat slang and was not suitable for
completing the official combat order; “Bombing" is not verbose in a military
manner; “Attacking” did not reflect the specifics of our kind of weapon ... Indeed, it’s
better not to “bombard”, perhaps.

Well then, bombard so bombard ...

Lebedev and I uncovered the regiment commander, turned and left the dugout to the
light of day.

Preparations for the departure were in full swing in the forest: technicians drove
motors, gunsmiths hung bombs and loaded machine guns, gas stations crawled,
dodging among trees. From the ringing roar of engines and the alarming crack of test
machine-gun bursts, snow fell from the branches. Air jets from the spinning screws
picked it up and turned it into some kind of amazing, twisted with a corkscrew, it is
not known where and where - from heaven to earth or from earth to sky - a sweeping
snowstorm.

At home, in the dugout of our squadron, they were waiting for us.

Pilots, navigators, radio arrows, attentively, without special comments, listened to the
assignment. No one had any questions. After about five minutes, one could already
give the command “By Cars!”, But this did not make sense, since there was a good
half hour left before the scheduled departure time.

Either the task did not differ much from dozens of others performed by the squadron
in recent months, or I was too concise in my commander inexperience, but somehow
or another there was a gap between receiving a combat order and the beginning of
vigorous activity to carry it out - dozens of minutes of empty time .

Subsequently, I learned that such a gap is extremely undesirable. But this time I had
no choice but to continue to sit in the dugout, to keep up the conversation,
convulsively jumping from one extraneous topic to another, and to glance several
times a minute at the clock.

However, besides all this, there was another thing available to me - I could observe
others. While doing this, I easily discovered a striking circumstance: none of the
participants of the upcoming departure remained exactly as they were before the
announcement of the combat order!

In some, the changes in facial expression, in the manner of speaking, in the whole
appearance were more noticeable, in others they were more hidden, but to one degree
or another they touched all those present (not excluding, probably, myself).

The people I looked at were certainly brave. This was evidenced by their daily,
current, everyday combat work: bombing, reconnaissance, difficult battles with
enemy fighters, with anti-aircraft guns, even with the harsh, changeable weather of
the first military winter. And they will undoubtedly fulfill the task ahead today
perfectly. Of course, these people, at least most of them, are not a cowardly dozen!

However, what in essence means “bold”? And what is the place of this pretty human
character in our flight profession? ..

In early youth, when I looked with enthusiastic eyes at real aviation from its aircraft
model vestibule, the meaning of the expression “good pilot” did not cause me the
slightest doubt. By obediently following journalists and writers, I mentally endowed
good pilots with such epithets as “brave”, “courageous”, “fearless”.

And only when I was in the TsAGI flight test department, I was not surprised to find
that among the test pilots themselves there are very different ratings: “competent”,
“meticulous”, sometimes unexpected - “tricky” and, as the highest compliment,
“reliable ".

No one said here: “he flies amazingly,” or “amazingly,” or “brilliantly.” The peak of

the positive assessment was the remark: “he flies competently” or “professionally”.

And of course, not one terminology was concerned here.

At the beginning of these notes, I already talked about how, under the influence of
senior comrades - the TsAGI test pilot team - a new, strictly business outlook was
gradually forming in me on such categories as risk, courage, courage. The ordinary
and exceptional in the guise of the flight profession imperceptibly (although, frankly,
not without some internal resistance) changed places in my mind.

Over the years that followed, my comrades-in-arms, in fulfillment of their duty (they
themselves were more likely to say "doing service"), showed tens and hundreds of
examples of such courage that it was impossible to miss it without noticing. And of
course, each such case was perceived by all of us with great respect. But still, we
appreciated the worthy behavior of the pilot in a difficult environment, primarily
from the standpoint of a purely business one, considering him as one of the rational,
profitable, and therefore mandatory elements of flight skill. To the question: what
about, in essence, such courage as a psychological and moral category, not only that
there was no interest, but simply did not reach the hands.

***

A letter from a group of Baltic Fleet sailors sent to me shortly after the war by the
editors of a naval newspaper caught me, frankly, by surprise.

Here is what the senior sailor A. Abdukadyrov and his comrades wrote:

"We started a debate about heroism, about a feat. Some believe that the hero is the
one who is not afraid of anything. He can rush into the stormy sea at night without
thinking, smoke on a powder keg, one can fight against several, boldly He will argue
with the commander if he feels right. Such an enemy will not be afraid. Here’s Pavka
Korchagin - after all, there was a daredevil, as they say ... But Chkalov? He didn’t
leave the guardhouse. And what a hero he was!

Others say that only someone who in everyday life does not step a step from the
charter is capable of feat, always impeccably obeys orders. Or maybe such a person is
simply afraid of punishment? Then in a moment of danger he’s even more chickened!

There is also an opinion among us that certain conditions are necessary for a feat. At
the front, in battle - it all depends on you. And what about us? .. It’s almost
considered a feat if the sailor in stormy weather shifts two shifts in a row on a
shift. But is that heroism? And what is heroism in general? .. "

At first, I confess, I was not going to answer this letter.

I did not intend, first of all, because I could not at all consider myself to be such a
“specialist in exploits”, who would know something unknown to other mortals in this
area, and who could, with a meaningful look of the oracle, tell this “something” to
eagerly listening humanity.

Every day I had to meet people who were much more worthy than me, to act as
teachers and mentors in this matter. They, as they say, would have cards in their
hands. And indeed, there are hardly any universal recipes for feat, courage, courage
in nature that could, like tags, be attached to these phenomena.

Nevertheless, the letter of the sailors, with all the exaggerated polarity of the “types of
heroism” depicted in it, made me think and prompted attempts to formulate at least
for myself - what, after all, is such courage?

Many of the allegations of the sailors, the authors of the above letter, were
objectionable.

First of all, about "not afraid of anything."

The instinct of self-preservation is a natural property of man. There are no people

who would be completely indifferent to the dangers threatening them.
The whole difference between the so-called "brave" and the so-called "cowardly"
people is the ability or, conversely, the inability to act, despite the danger, reasonably
and in accordance with the command of their duty - military, official, civil, and
sometimes unwritten - moral .

Over time, such a course of action becomes a habit. And then a “brave” person
acquires a strong, almost automatic skill to drive the consciousness of danger
somewhere far into the depths of his psyche so that natural anxiety for his own well-
being does not prevent him from reasoning and acting quickly, deftly, clearly - not
worse, but better than in a normal, relaxed atmosphere.

If we talk about natural, young from the natural courage or shyness inherent in a
given person, then they cannot be regarded as a complete absence of a nervous
system reaction to danger in the first case and the presence of such a reaction in the
second. The nerves of a normal, mentally healthy person never remain indifferent to
danger. It can only be two different types of this ever-arising reaction.

And then a dugout dugout came up in my memory, in which two dozen people were
waiting for a flight to meet enemy fighters, multi-layer anti-aircraft fire, to meet
possible death.

I repeat, none of these people remained exactly as they were before the
announcement of the combat order. But by the nature of the visible changes, it was
possible to divide all those present in the dugout into two clearly distinct groups.

Some have become louder. Their faces turned pink. They did not sit still. They either
jumped up, then sat down again, or were taken without the obvious need to shift
equipment in their tablets. Their nervous system became agitated, activated. Of
course, it was an excitement caused by a consciousness of impending danger. But -
the excitement of brave people. The very excitement due to which they were
repeatedly tested in battle - acted energetically, actively, decisively, noticed all the
changes in the transient situation of air battles in time and made reasonable,
competent decisions in accordance with this. As a result, such people were considered
(and indeed were) brave, and success in battle almost always accompanied them.

But there were others among those present. They froze. Turned pale. We went deep
into ourselves. They did not want to not only talk, but even listen to the conversations
of others: in order to attract their attention, sometimes they had to call them by name
several times. The nervous system of this category of people also reacted to the
impending danger, but reacted in its own way: inhibition, decreased activity. Of
course, it was difficult to achieve success in battle, much less to be considered a
daredevil in such a state.

A letter from sailor Abdukadyrov and his comrades showed in my memory this
seemingly firmly forgotten episode of the first military winter, probably because the
conditions for psychological observations were very favorable at that time. Just like in
the laboratory: here there is a rather large group of people who were put under
absolutely identical conditions by force of circumstances, and a heightened nervous
situation caused by the notoriously risky task (the flight turned out to be really
difficult), as well as the fact that the not-so-experienced presenter was unable to
calculate the study time tasks so that to finish it with a command: “By cars!”

***

Getting acquainted with the pilot, we like to ask the traditional question, as old as
aviation itself:

- Is flying scary?

If we approach this question seriously (which, in most such cases, of course, should
not be done), then it is impossible to answer it with the monosyllable “yes” or “no”.

In every flight, not even combat or test (it is difficult to say which of them is sharper),
the pilot is forced to demand more from his nervous system than almost in any other
form of labor human activity.

But contrary to popular belief, the nature of this inevitable neuropsychic load does
not primarily consist in overcoming “fear”, but is most often associated with things
much more innocent: compelled by unchanging posture, noise, vibrations, and most
importantly, by a long-lasting uninterrupted tension of attention. While the pilot
controls the aircraft, he cannot even afford to mentally distract from his
business. Cannot get up, stretch, walk around the room to shake off fatigue. It should
always be ready without delay and properly respond to possible complications of the
situation. Forced to act without pauses and stops, at the pace that is set by external
circumstances - the change of flight stages. This is the main thing! And not in the all-
consuming revelry of the instinct of self-preservation.

For some reason, in the aviation literature there is a clear enumeration of all kinds of
fears. Even in the mentioned book “Alone in the Endless Sky”, written by William
Bridgman in collaboration with the writer Jacqueline Hazard, this fashion was given
abundant tribute.

The word "fear" is repeated there by the way and inappropriately on almost every
page. “The fear that gripped me” (this is due to interruptions - not even to a complete
failure) - the engine was running), “the upcoming meeting with the plane inspired me
fear”, “to leave all this to meet fear”, “a well-known feeling of fear and emptiness
before every flight, ”and so on, until the message that the flight mission seemed to the
pilot a court sentence, and the new plane evoked his association no more and no less
than ... with an operating table and even an electric chair!

All this contradicts, first of all, the appearance of Bridgman himself, his excellent
high-speed and high-altitude flights on a Skyrocket rocket, in which record-high
values were reached for the beginning of the fifties (24 kilometers) and speed (1, 88
sound speeds). Under the yoke of persistent fear, such flights cannot be performed.

By the way, in articles published in the American press by Bridgman himself -

without co-authorship with Hazard - there are no such fears. I’m afraid that they
appeared in the book as a result of the retreat of the truth of life before considerations
of “readability” (this sometimes happens, and, as we know, not only in America).
In fact, the emotions of the pilot before and during the flight are, it seems to me, a
complex, multi-component alloy: here there is a taste for his work, and technical and
universal curiosity, a sense of duty, pride, even excitement, which is similar in nature
to sports, and probably a lot more.

Present here, of course, is the familiar reaction of the nervous system to danger - fear,
in the terminology of Bridgman and Jacqueline Azar.

But his place in this complex bouquet of feelings is far from the first.

Otherwise, no pilot would simply fly. And even more so - to see in this the highest
pleasure of your life!

Grigory Aleksandrovich Sedov, Honored Test Pilot of the USSR, Hero of the Soviet
Union, very precisely said on this occasion: “If a person, setting off for flight, believes
that he is going on a feat, then he is ready for flight ... not ready!”

This adage has become a classic.

And, like any classic, it is often often misinterpreted and even attributed to
authorship to other persons. Therefore, I take this opportunity to reproduce these
very accurate, smart and correct words, as well as to remind who their true author is.

Many years later, the cosmonaut Alexander Ivanchenkov, who was close in meaning
and equally accurate, was asked when he was asked whether it was scary to go into
outer space:

“This is not fear, but a sense of reasonable alertness.”

But where is the line between reasonable, justified risk and senseless, dangerous
mischief - the fact that aviation has long been given the figurative name: "air
hooliganism"?

Generally speaking, such a line exists - it is a necessity, the public expediency of an

act that claims to be called heroic.

Thoughtlessly neglecting danger is irrational. Moreover, it is immoral. It is immoral

because a person does not have the right to senselessly, “just like that” risking the
precious gift of nature - his own life.

It would seem that everything is clear. The touchstone is found - it remains to use it

consistently.

Unfortunately (and perhaps fortunately), living life is more complicated than any
slender scheme. The iron criterion of expediency is sometimes very cunningly
disguised.

Take even the notorious air hooliganism - without exaggeration, one of the worst evils
in aviation. More than once, this label was hung without undue reflection on the
pilot’s attempts to reach all the depths of his machine’s capabilities, to practically
make sure that it can, and what it cannot, and learn to perfectly use this “what can”.

Moreover: it sometimes happens that the pilot performs obviously technically

accessible to his aircraft, but nevertheless very risky maneuvers in order to accustom
himself not to lose his hardness and loyalty to the eyes in those situations in which
they are especially necessary.

The sailors - the authors of the letter I received - mentioned Chkalov. Indeed, his
flight biography can be said to be full of confirmation of what has just been
said. Everyone knows, for example, how once Chkalov flew under one of the
spreading Leningrad bridges across the Neva. It is less known that almost every pilot
of subsequent generations at a certain stage of their flight life, when their own
piloting skills seem impeccable, and the plane is infinitely obedient (this is a happy,
albeit very unsafe, condition usually occurs in the second or third year of flight
service and lasts, thank God, not for long), found “his” bridge, flew under it one or
several times and in such a purely straightforward, but convincing way gained in his
own eyes the right to feel worthy Chkalov’s heir.

Why did they do this? Why did Chkalov fly under the bridge?

The easiest way would be to say - air hooliganism, especially since there were, of
course, elements of this phenomenon in the behavior of both the youngest Chkalov
and his lesser-known followers. But, of course, they are not alone.

If we approach the same flight under the bridge, so to speak, with a ruler in hand, it is
easy to establish that it is technically feasible. The distance between the bridge
supports exceeds the scope of the plane on which Chkalov flew, no less than three
times. In the gap between the surface of the water and the lower point of the central
span, the aircraft also passes with a fair margin.

Of course, Chkalov himself was unlikely to measure these reserves to the nearest
meter. But we should not even think that the span under the bridge was made by him
in the order, so to speak, of an instant impromptu - with only one so-called
“mischievous highlight”, without any preliminary estimate. The estimate - and quite
reliable - was: Chkalov’s friends, who were serving with him at that time, testified
that he had watched the bridge over and over again, both from the shore and from
above, hanging over the railing. And he came to the firm conclusion: yes, it passes ...

It would seem that after this it remains to calmly aim from afar and fly yourself at an
altitude of two to three meters above the water, until the bridge rumbles with a
sonorous drum echo above the pilot's head and is not left behind. To perform such a
shaving flight over the water is quite affordable for any pilot of average skill.

The only additional circumstance that complicates matters somewhat is ... the
presence of the bridge itself. Complicates for the same difficult reason, because of
which it is much easier to pass on a board lying on the ground than if it were at the
level of the sixth floor.
It was this purely psychological factor that I wanted to try - feel with my own hands -
Chkalov. The bridge for him was a control tool with which he measured his ability not
to make mistakes in the very case in which it was impossible to make mistakes. You
need to prepare for such cases ahead of time!

You can, of course, argue about the advantages and disadvantages of the training
methodology chosen by Chkalov and his followers. It is unlikely that it deserves
unconditional approval.

But to stick to it only one label of air hooliganism is also impossible ...

And here is another example of a bold, moreover, a heroic act whose expediency is far
from obvious at first glance.

On the very first military winter of the forty-first to forty-second years, which I
already recalled at the beginning of this chapter, test pilot Viktor Nikolayevich
Yuganov was the commander of a fighter aviation regiment on the Kalinin Front.

This was the second war in which he had a chance to participate: he came to our team
as a thin twenty-year-old lieutenant with the Order of the Red Banner of War for
Khalkhin Gol on his chest.

The test talent of this outstanding pilot was fully revealed already in the post-war
years. Suffice it to say that it was he who was the first to fly into the air such, without
exaggeration, a staged aircraft in the history of our aviation, like a jet fighter with a
swept wing MiG-15.

On the day in question, Yuganov received a task at the head of his link to accompany
the bombers.

By the time the Pe-2 group, based deeper in the rear, approached the advanced
fighter airfield, Yuganov and both of his wingmen (the fighter unit at that time
consisted not of four, but of three aircraft) were sitting in the cabs of their cars and
were ready to start the engines for takeoff.

Seeing the bombers above his head, Victor waved his hand at the follower - “start it!”
- he opened the air cock, turned on the ignition and pressed the start vibrator
button. Sneezing exhausts of compressed air, the engine idly went over the propeller
blades several times, then gave a flash, another one and earned it, spitting out a cloud
of smoke from the oil accumulated during parking in the combustion chambers.

A glance to the left - the screw on the left slave is already spinning.

A look to the right is worse: the right wingman unsuccessfully tries to start the
engine. The second attempt, the third - again to no avail. Apparently, more than
thirty-degree frost makes itself felt, having managed to cool the engine in such a short
time that it requires repeated heating with a special stove. Scandal! Full scandal!

And the six divers, having spread in a twist of that turn, is already making the third
circle above the airfield. They also have time scheduled by the minute. Regardless of
the circumstances, with or without escort, they must deliver a bomb strike on a target
not sometime, but precisely at a given moment.

You can no longer wait. And Yuganov, briefly abandoning his only follower ready for
take-off: “Falcon-nin! Follow me! ”, Taxis out onto a narrow strip of a field airfield
cleared of snow, unfolds at its end and starts to run.

A few more seconds - and the fighter is in the air. The left hand of the pilot with the
usual movement presses on the black ball of the head of the chassis lever and raises it
up. A light hissing, barely audible through the noise of the engine, a double clap of
closing flaps on the bottom of the fuselage, and the car rushed forward and up even
more energetically: the chassis retracted.

And at the same moment, Yuganov notes with a side vision: behind his left shoulder
he is empty - there is no follower. A quick turn of the head, and the slave immediately
becomes visible, in which one leg of the chassis is removed, and the second as if
nothing had happened absurdly sticks out. Because of this, the car has already lagged
a good fifteen to twenty meters from the lead and continues to lag further.

“The right leg is not removed,” the follower reports to Yuganov.

- Calm down! Try again: drop the chassis and remove again.

But neither the second, nor the third, nor the fourth attempt of success brings. As
always in such cases, a healthy leg is obediently released and retracted, and the
striker stubbornly sticks out in its former position. In this form - with an uncleaned
leg - a fighter in a dogfight will not be reinforcements for his comrades, but only a
burden.

There is no more time to think. And Yuganov, mentally (and maybe not only
mentally) cursing tightly, commands the wingman to land, and with an energetic
slide he attaches himself to the bombers, who have already taken the course to the
front line, to the target.

This did not fit into any norms of air force tactics, but the pilot Yuganov flew alone to
accompany the bombers behind enemy lines!

Recklessness? A gesture of despair?

So it really seemed at first glance: well, what kind of help would a single fighter give
to the escort when at least six or eight Messerschmitts (in a smaller composition they
did not fly) fell on him?

Then, on earth, Yuganov convincingly answered this question.

His answer was simple and logical: he had practically no chance of winning a battle
with a group of enemy fighters - he understood this perfectly. But to upset the battle
order of the enemy, distract him from the bombers, at least until they drop bombs,
and perhaps even to shoot down one or two enemy fighters, he counted firmly.
“And indeed,” added Victor, “there is a calculation to sacrifice one single-engine
fighter aircraft, in which one person sits, for the sake of covering, at least with the
body of his own machine, a twin-engine triple bomber. Even such a game is worth the
candle. And I was hoping to catch something else before they beat me ...

This conversation with Yuganov - fortunately, he still took place - took place already
on earth. And in the air, the leader of the group of dive bombers, realizing the selfless
plan of the fighter, instructed his wingmen to monitor the lone hawk, to cover it with
the fire of airborne machine guns in battle, and if it is damaged, but can at least
somehow stay in the air, - open up, let into the middle of his system and so escort to
the house.

This time the case went without a fight. The stealth of the actions of the whole group
was greatly helped by the favorable (in this case, it means very bad) weather in the
target area. The meeting with the enemy fighters did not take place.

But it is difficult to overestimate the moral upsurge of the crews of the bombers, who
saw throughout the flight a "fighter cover" in the face of a small, lone airplane flying
over them! It was, one might say, a practical lesson on the topic “What is heroism”! ..

***

The nervous excitement that occurs in a normal healthy person in a moment of

danger, not only equips him in order to get out of the most acute situation as a
winner. It, among other things, also facilitates the psychological burden associated
with this, for a very busy, actively acting person is not up to the worries.

But how disgusting it is when the influx of energy caused by the consciousness of
danger does not find a way out due to certain circumstances! ..

It was again on the diving bomber Pe-2, almost no different from the one on which I
had the opportunity to conquer the first military winter.

It would seem, what else to experience for a long time and repeatedly tested and even
passed a cruel combat test machine?

But we did not experience it.

We are the lead engineer V.V. Utkin and I - tested propellers.

New, experienced weather vane propellers on an old production airplane.

You should not think that the work of the test pilot is only to test completely new
designs. If this were so, then a long line of unemployed testers would immediately
form on each machine.

In addition to tests of experimental aircraft, there are tests of their modifications,

tests of engines, propellers, aircraft equipment, weapons, a lot of different types of
research flights, in which you don’t have to “teach how to fly” a new machine, but to
get an answer to some fundamental question posed by aviation science ... In short, for
a long time I would have to list all types of flights, united by the name - "test"!

So, Utkin and I tested the vane propeller. More than once we stopped him in the
air. On one side of the narrow glazed nose of the bomber, everything remained in its
usual form: the celluloid disk of the screw gleamed in the sun, and the engine working
at full power roared. On the other hand, the motor was silent, the red-hot air at its
exhaust pipes did not tremble, strangely turned out rotor blades froze in
motionlessness. And the plane at least that - not only flew horizontally, but even
made turns in both directions and gained altitude on one engine.

We tested the behavior of the new screw at different speeds and altitudes and
managed to penetrate considerable trust in it. But it was not in vain that the senior
colleagues repeated to me so many times:

- Until the last day of testing, keep the test object under suspicion! Hope for the best,
but be prepared for the worst every second ...

And this worst lies in wait for us!

Lurked, as always in such cases, at the most unfavorable moment. However, it is "as

always", probably seeming. It's just that all the unpleasant situations from which it
was relatively easy to get out are quickly forgotten. And difficult cases are
remembered for a long time. For this, probably, reason, one of my friends even made
an attempt to formulate, as he claimed, the “universal law of all natural phenomena”
in the following form:

- Any event is all the more likely the less it is desirable.

Of course, no one, including the author of the given pessimistic formulation, would
undertake to defend it seriously, but statistics (in any case, settled in our heads)
spoke in her favor.

We had to check the multiple insertion of the screw into the vane position at a low
height. The altimeter showed exactly five hundred meters when I set the cruising
speed, made sure that we were flying exactly along the axis of our test area, took the
gas from the right engine and nodded to Utkin, who was sitting behind my shoulder:

- Come on!

Victor threw the feathering control toggle switch to “input” and pressed the
stopwatch. The screw began to slow down, when suddenly he started and with a
nasty, high-pitched, growing howl began to gain momentum - he went into full
uncontrolled promotion. The plane menacingly sharply, as if someone had grabbed it
by the tail, braked and began to settle down uncontrollably. Now - with the screw
unscrewed - the thrust of the second motor in order to continue horizontal flight was
categorically not enough.

A quick look back: where is the airfield? There he is behind his left shoulder.
I vigorously turn the car around, at the same time transferring it to the most
advantageous speed - one at which we are most slowly approaching (alas,
approaching!) To the ground.

The shutters and shutters of the switched off motor are tightly closed, and on the
serviceable one they are covered as much as possible so as not to overheat the only
working motor. And yet, despite all the measures taken, the car is steadily decreasing!

I can’t do anything else. Utkin in this sense is nevertheless easier: he continues his

stubborn, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to drive this damn screw into a weather
vane. True, the results are not yet visible, but somehow he is “in action”.

All I have to do is wait. Long, full-bodied minutes to wait - what in the end will be
under the fragile, transparent nose of our car, when the reserve of altitude, which
decreases every second, finally melts: a flat field of an airfield or a thick picket of trees
of a gloomy, dense forest?

More than once I had to see glades pierced by an airplane falling into the forest. First,
the tops were cut off, then the trees were cut somewhere in the middle of the trunk
and standing like well cranes, with a peak drooping to the ground, and, finally, a
continuous windbreak of a warped, charred tree rag, interspersed with the scattered
remains of the plane ... and everything that was in it .

I do not presume to say that the memories of such things, which flickered somewhere
in the back of the mind, acted inspiringly.

Strictly did not want to stick into the forest.

A minute earlier, this forest steadily floated back. Now his run has accelerated. Then
it became even faster. And now the trees, merging into a continuous brown-green
veil, flickering menacingly almost under the very belly of the plane. No, we did not fly
faster. I still definitely keep the same constant best rate. The situation is worse - we
are flying very low already!

All the usual noises of flight, even the roar of the left-handed engine running at full
throttle, are blocked by a piercing, sharp, somehow, if this expression can be applied
to an object of inanimate nature, a hysterical howl of a screw. Oil beats from under
the hood. Thank God, though nothing is burning yet!

It is generally accepted that a test pilot, taming a technician who suddenly stepped
out of obedience, has to perform one action after another at a feverish pace: turn on
and off different buttons and toggle switches, turn all sorts of helms, pull something
towards yourself, push something away from you - in a word, to work hard, in order
to have time to do everything that is necessary, within a matter of seconds, released at
his disposal by harsh circumstances. For no experience here, neither time nor volume
of attention remains.

Indeed, most often it is.

Many years after the spin-up that happened with Utkin and me, the engine on a
supersonic test pilot V.S. Ilyushin. The high-speed fighter, having lost traction,
poured to the ground with great speed (the verb “plan” simply does not fit here),
uncontrollably falling by many tens of meters per second. The airfield was, however,
not far, but, as they say, not where it should be. To get on it, it was necessary to
describe a very cunning curve in space - something like a deep, steeply descending
spiral of variable radius. It was difficult, very difficult, carrying out this dizzying
spiral, at the same time to figure out where the trajectory of the aircraft would hit the
ground: at the airport or to it? And depending on this, it is timely to decide whether
to continue the approach or, if this is hopeless, to eject?

After the successful completion of this difficult landing, Ilyushin was asked:

- Volodya, and at what point in the run did you make sure that you were on the
airfield?

The pilot hesitated for a second and, apparently deciding not to darken (the
conversation took place among his colleagues and had considerable business, purely
professional significance for them), admitted:

- Finally - when he sat down ...

This was the case in which the test pilot fell into an extremely difficult position and
coped with it perfectly. But psychologically he managed - precisely because of his
extreme transience - cheaper than, in essence, the much simpler situation in which
Utkin and I found ourselves. There was only one thing left for us: passively expect.

But finally, in the haze ahead, the field of our airfield brightens! The elbow is close! I
wonder if it will still be possible to bite him?

The last trees at the very edge of the forest seem to me even higher than the rest. Of
course, this only seems to be, but now even such a circumstance as a little more or a
little less height of these last pines (“They waved it too, damn them!”) Can play a
decisive role in the outcome of the case.

I’m not sure that we didn’t cut off several tops with screws on the very border of the
forest, because the pace of events at this moment again extremely accelerated.

And at the same time, new problems arose. In half a minute we will be on the ground,
but to release the chassis - I intuitively feel it - is too early. The wheels going outside
will sharply increase the resistance, the car will brake, and we will land among the
pits and ditches, not reaching the airfield (here it is, enclosing its fence: right in front
of us) of some two hundred meters. But it is also impossible to delay the release of the
chassis: it comes out not instantly, but within about fifteen seconds. His racks will not
have time to completely go out and lock before landing - and the car will also be
broken, moreover, in an even more embarrassing way: in the middle of our own
airfield, which we had so much difficulty reaching. Sooner - bad, and late - bad. It is
necessary to start the production of the chassis precisely - in the "very" second so that
it comes to the end by the time of landing.
... Early ... early ... early ... time! Obeying my intuition - my "flying eye" - I turn the
landing gear crane all the way forward and immediately with my whole body I feel the
car braking. Here an aerodrome fence slipped beneath us (they did reach it!), And the
plane rushes over the even green grass of the airfield.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a green light coming on on the dashboard. But where
is the second? The plane is almost in a landing position, now it will land, but one leg
is not released!

And here, to Utkin's pure surprise, who, with meritorious equanimity, was watching
the course of events, I barked loudly, turning to the hesitating right leg:

- Well, come on! Quickly!

And at that very instant the foot fell into place. And literally the next instant, the
wheels of the plane rustled on the grass of the airfield ...

But the most nasty thing in the whole story was a passive expectation: where will our
inevitable decline end - at the airport or among the mighty trunks of a perennial
forest?

This was disgusting primarily because it was unnatural - it was contrary to the
manifestation of a normal human reaction to danger: the desire for vigorous activity.

Therefore, experienced, qualified, experienced observers fly through and endure all
sorts of risky situations, as a rule, more nervous than pilots. The point here is not, of
course, that some are "braver", while others are "more cowardly." Just a pilot in such
situations is usually more busy than an observer.

True, I came across - especially in the years when the so-called narrow specialists
began to appear in abundance on board the test aircraft - and such observers who
maintained an enviable Olympic calm even in the most dangerous situations. But this
was explained by another: they simply did not understand enough in aviation to
correctly assess the riskiness of what was happening.

This was the so-called courage of ignorance.

Many young pilots suffer the same courage of ignorance (they are ill), causing great
admiration in some part of the aviation and, unfortunately, even the aviation public.

However, their fans do not like flying with such pilots. They fly more willingly with
pilots, who are reproached for their caution.

***

Nowadays, a bold act - especially in aviation (but, of course, not in it alone) - almost
always has its own “technology”. Roughly speaking, one must be able to commit such
an act.

Spectacular lines:
... reason contrary to

Contrary to the elements ... -

in aviation they are categorically inapplicable: the elements succeed in “defying” the
elements here, only steadily following the dictates of reason.

Often, knowledge is so arming a person that he, without experiencing any anxiety,
confidently does his job, while observers on the side of the audience are surprised at
his courage. So, a resident of a big city calmly crosses a busy street. He is guided by
the indications of traffic lights, knows the location of the "security islands",
understands the intentions of car drivers - in general, he knows how to act in this
case.

And for a man who comes to him, the same street seems to be a chaotic pile of all
sorts of dangers; Having seen that the transport stopped at the intersection, he
cannot decide for a long time to begin the transition. Having finally gathered his
courage - just at the moment when the traffic signal changes again and the mass of
cars accumulated at the intersection, roaring with motors, starts moving, he rushes
against them with courage of despair. In fact, he is right, this newcomer: crossing the
street is really insanely dangerous enterprise for him. But he considers the capital's
old-timer a daredevil in vain.

Similarly, a pilot who perfectly knows a bunch of modern technology - an airplane -

very often quietly, in the full awareness of his safety, performs maneuvers, which
sometimes seem quite risky. Such a state — let's call it conditionally the courage of
knowledge — is the direct antipode of the courage of ignorance. Direct and, most
importantly, much more reliable!

The history of aviation knows many examples confirming this. Even at the time,
Nesterov insisted on doing turns and turns necessarily with a roll - the deeper the
steeper the turn. Now we just can’t imagine how you can do bends differently. But in
the days of Nesterov - before the First World War - many pilots and even pilot
instructors feared any significant rolls.

Nesterov, according to the testimony of the oldest Russian pilot K.K. Artseulova

introduced a deep bend into practice - with a roll of more than 45 °, at which the so-
called “change of rudders” occurs: the elevator starts working as the rudder, and the
rudder as the elevator. Abroad, the Wright brothers were the predecessors of
Nesterov in this search - they also performed turns with a bank that was significantly
larger than their colleagues.

Psychologically, the pilots of those times can perhaps be understood: they had to
spend so much effort and attention in order to maintain a normal position in space
on their not very stable, often poorly controlled aircraft! And then someone offers
them, with their own hand, to deliberately take the car out of this so carefully
maintained position. Scary!

And it took a lot of time (a long time after that, many old instructors taught to
perform U-turns with a “plate”) and - alas! - blood so that emotion gives way to the
onslaught of knowledge. Now not a single beginner ’accounting consumes even a
grain of his nervous energy on“ experiences ”and doesn’t feel like a hero in the least,
laying the car in a deep bend with one wing to the sky and the other to the ground.

Many more examples can be given of how our very concept of danger — what is
dangerous and what is not dangerous — underwent an amazing transformation over
time.

When the first planes with retractable landing gear appeared, the pilots treated him
like any innovation, at first clearly wary: you remove the wheels, they say, and then,
you see what good, they won’t come out! By the way, such fears could not be called
one hundred percent sucked from the finger: the design of the retractable chassis was
still being worked out and the reliability of their action left much to be desired.

One way or another, leaving the flight, the pilot in those days often asked:

- Like a chassis: you can not remove? There are no maximum speeds and figures in
the task ...

And the boss letting out the car, also not without some relief, allowed:

- Yes of course. Do not clean. Today is not required ...

But not a few years have passed since the attitude of the flight crew to the retractable
landing gear changed, one might say, one hundred and eighty degrees. Each pilot
began to strive to “tighten his paws” as soon as possible, immediately after
takeoff. And he was pushed to it by none other than the same safety considerations
that until recently had made it necessary to avoid cleaning the chassis. The pilots
realized that the sooner you remove the landing gear, the faster you gain both speed
and altitude: two whales on which flight safety is based. If, more than the aspirations,
some kind of trouble happens immediately after takeoff, say, with the engine, then
with the retracted landing gear and back to the airfield, there are more chances to
turn out, and if you have to, it’s safer to sit in the field.

Is it logical? Of course, it’s logical.

Consciousness that the landing gear is completely retracted, forever became for the
pilot as reassuring as it was once the consciousness that it was released. And even the
red lights on the dashboard, signaling the cleaning of the chassis, began to look not
alarming, but somehow pacifying. So then believe psychologists when they say that
every color contributes to the appearance in the human soul of quite certain moods!

Dangerous and safe exchanged places.

Of course, several reasons played a role in this transformation: the ordinary habit, the
accumulation of statistics, and much more, but in the first place, nevertheless, the
progress of technology (in this case, the improvement of the chassis
designs). Moreover, the progress correctly assessed, perceived by people exploiting
this technique.
 YESTERN IT WAS EXOTIC
YESTERN IT WAS EXOTIC

A broad, almost full horizon, ghostly shadow, rhythmically flickering, sweeps across
the sky above my head.

To the beat these flickers are heard loud, clapping even through the noise of the
motor - as if someone was shaking a huge blanket. The cabin trembles and somehow,
not in an airplane way. Even the control knob in my hand does not breathe as always.

I fly by helicopter.

More precisely, on a helicopter: then, in the forty-ninth year, the word "helicopter"
did not yet exist. And the shadow above my head did not belong to the rotor, as they
would say now, but to the rotor.

But it was not the terminological problems that occupied me at that moment: to cope
with this low-power, low-speed, small-sized machine turned out to be a much trickier
thing than one might expect. In any case, I had to sweat a lot more than on jet
fighters, heavy bombers and almost all the other aircraft that I used to fly before ...

Now, when these lines are being written, the helicopter has firmly entered both the
national economy and the arsenal of defense equipment, and, one might say, into our
whole life.

There is no need to talk about the use of a helicopter in transport and medical
aviation, in the Arctic, Antarctic and any other expeditions, in mineral exploration -
in other words, wherever it is most convenient to approach the target from the air,
and there are no landing sites, and it is impossible to build them ( or irrational).

It was necessary to replace the roof ceilings of the Catherine’s Palace in Pushkin Park
that were damaged during the war, and moreover, to do without cutting down the
centuries-old park trees surrounding the palace — those that Pushkin once
admired! And these historic trees were saved. It was possible with the help of a
powerful twin-engine helicopter - a "flying car", used as an air crane. With his light
hand (unless, of course, it is permissible to call such a hand light), the use of
helicopters in construction, laying of pipelines, and installation of power
transmission towers began in our country.

However, one should not consider the helicopter as the most modern invention of the
post-war years. Long before the start of the war, the Central Aerohydrodynamic
Institute (TsAGI) had a special department of special constructions - OOK, which was
engaged in the study and construction of rotorcraft.
On created under the guidance of its leading workers - I.P. Bratukhina,
A.M. Izaksona, N.I. Kamova, V.A. Kuznetsova, V.P. Lapisova, N.K. Skrzhinsky,
A.M. Cheremukhina - test pilots A.P. Chernavsky, S.A. Korzinschikov, D.A. Kosits
(known in those years not only as a strong pilot, but also as a man of rare wit, a
constant radio commentator and entertainer at all pre-war celebrations of Aviation
Day in Tushino), V.A. Karpov and others.

By the way, his famous dictum on what a real test pilot should fly, Sergey
Alexandrovich Korzinshchikov uttered just after the next flight on a rotorcraft, clearly
attributing it to the category of objects that, “generally speaking, cannot fly”.

And built at the same time under the guidance of Professor A.M. Cheremukhina was
the first helicopter in our country to test in the air ... A.M. Cheremukhin. The flights
were extremely successful, and soon Alexei Mikhailovich became, in addition to all
his other degrees and titles, a world record holder - holding a record for a flight
altitude on a helicopter, which at that time was six hundred and odd meters.

But all this was, so to speak, a piece of work. Her results rarely led to at least a small
series, and more often remained materialized in the form of original single
prototypes. Only after the war did aviation technology matured to the creation of
helicopters, which were built in large batches and could take a serious, quite business
place in the national economy and defense of the country.

A young, specially organized design bureau headed by Doctor of Technical Sciences

Mikhail Leontyevich Mil, undertook this business, and in the recent past, he was a
TsAGI scientist, a prominent specialist in the field of stability and controllability of a
wide variety of (not just rotorcraft) aircraft.

At the same time, I.P. design bureaus worked on the creation of

helicopters. Bratukhina, N.I. Kamova, A.S. Yakovleva. They were preparing to fly
their cars, and soon test pilots K.I. Ponomarev, M.D. Gurov and V.V. Tezavrovsky -
now not one of them, unfortunately, is already with us.

Milya also had his own test pilot, Matvey Karlovich Baikalov, who was well
acquainted with me since he worked at our institute at one time. He came to us
shortly before the war, in the midst of yet another emergency, this time connected
with the unreliable operation of engines on the latest MiG-3 high-speed fighters.

This aircraft, built simultaneously with the Yak-1 and LaGG-3 fighters, was the first to
exceed a speed of six hundred kilometers per hour. Then this speed, by today's
standards, is very modest even for passenger aircraft, it looked almost fantastic. But
there is no rose without thorns! First of all, new aircraft had to be “finished off” - to
get rid of “childhood diseases”, of which the MiG-third was almost the most insidious
had a poor engine response. Maybe that’s why many pilots initially flew the MiG-3
without apparent pleasure. I remember how one of them, a mature pilot and a very
avant-garde-looking man, with a vibration in his voice and reverently looking the
authorities in the eye, said:

- Each pilot has his own personal ceiling. So I feel that I have not reached the MiG-
3! I feel and honestly report about it ...
No, Baikalov did not feel anything like this. And if he felt, then, in any case, he did not
share his emotions with his superiors.

Of such situations, the pilots, clearly at odds with the tamer of predators Margarita
Nazarova, usually say:

“To fly on this machine is like kissing a tigress: it’s both scary and no pleasure! ..

But what can you do, without flying on the "tigress", it is impossible to turn it into a
reliably tamed, pet. Someone has to do this job.

And Matvey Baikalov without further ado, literally the day after his arrival in our
team joined the flights to reedit obstinate motors. This beginning allowed him to
immediately take his rightful place among our old-timers, often very picky about
newcomers.

And exactly one month after the outbreak of the war, on July 21, forty-first year, on
the night of the first fascist air raid on Moscow, Captain Baikalov, in a special night
fighter squad formed of test pilots, conducted his first air battle. Held on the same
MiG-3 aircraft, in the development of which he invested so much work.

Baikalov also fought on the Kalinin Front, and after that he worked hard to test a
variety of objects of aviation technology. In a word, at KB Mil he came to be a
knowledgeable, experienced and, moreover, sniffing gunpowder tester.

***

Behind Baikalov was already several dozen flights on a new helicopter, when he,
together with his car, suddenly became the center of attention of our aviation circles,
as is commonly expressed in the press.

This attention is not especially envious: most often it is caused by nothing more than
another incident. So it happened this time.

Climbing to a height of about five kilometers, Baikalov tried to extinguish the

translational speed of the helicopter.

I will not go into a technical analysis of what followed. One thing is important: the car
completely out of obedience to the pilot. It swayed uncontrollably with increasing
amplitude from bank to bank and from nose to tail. Matvey then said:

- I felt: now it will turn upside down. And then - that's it! Not only to return it to its
normal position, but it will not even be possible to throw it out, because there will be
a meat grinder between me and the ground - a rotating main rotor. Well, I think,
pretty messing around! I threw the door, opened the seatbelt lock, took a break
between the throws and jumped. He jumped, pulled in a few seconds, pulled the
ring. The parachute opened immediately. I caught my breath a little and looked,
looking: where is the helicopter? Yes, there he is, a hundred meters below me. He
turned over, the villain, down the screw, up the wheels and sprinkles himself in this
position to the ground. Yes, so evenly, calmly, steadily sprinkles, as if it were not at
all, and he had just just wandered from side to side like crazy. It is as if he wants to
tell me: “Here, brother, what pose I have been striving for all my life, but you did not
let me in!”

From the car, of course, there were only fragments. And yet this helicopter managed
to do a very important thing before its death - to lay the foundation for its own
experience as a young company. Already at the exit there was the next, more
advanced model, the very one that was destined to become the prototype of the first
domestic helicopter, which went into a large series - Mi-1.

The car was at the exit, and there was no one to fly on it. Landing after a forced
parachute jump, Baikalov was hurt a little - not very much, but enough to be picky
aviation medicine temporarily removed him from flying.

And then I received an offer from Mikhail Leontyevich Mil to take on the tests of a
new helicopter.

I don’t know why he chose me: whether my old - from the time of the three-wheeled
"pterodactyl" - played a role in all flying exoticism (and the helicopter in the forty-
ninth year was still firmly registered in the department of exotic aircraft), or I
remember it Milya’s interest, with which I once asked him during a meeting about
Baikalov’s flights, or maybe for some other reason, but one way or another the
proposal was made. And nothing prevented me from accepting it. The epic with the
tests of the “Fourth” had already ended by that time, the “twenty” had been
successfully handed over to customers, and I flew on one or the other plane on
current, no god knows what interesting tasks. In a word, Mile’s proposal came in very
handy.

Helicopter development began with hanging above the ground, during which
Baikalov, standing in a whirlwind of snow and dust close to the nose of the car,
performed something like a shamanic dance: he jumped, squatted, wriggled in every
possible way, waved his hands, trying to give out as quickly and clearly as possible to
me that which is referred to by TsU pilots (valuable instructions).

Frankly, neither Baikalov’s efforts, nor my own attempts to feel the helicopter’s
behavior while hanging, were particularly successful. All attention was devoted to
counteracting the machine’s active attempts to fall on its nose, then on its tail, then
on its side, and it was not possible to really get used to it. To do this, you had to try it
in motion.

And I spontaneously set out on a flight at an altitude of ten to fifteen meters above the
airfield of the airfield. From an airplane position, such a height, of course, looks
insignificant, but falling from it is still not recommended: after all, this is a three-
four-story building. By the way, the last circumstance was by no means one of
theoretical interest: the unstable apparatus in my still inexperienced hands
immediately began to sway menacingly with rapidly increasing amplitude.

It turned out to be extremely difficult to dampen these fluctuations: you stick the
handle forward, and the machine, as if nothing had happened, continues to fall onto
the tail, and only when the handle is given to the dashboard to failure does it
suddenly “catch on” and roll over onto the nose, so much so that it is completely
deflected at a feverish pace, the back of the handle is not enough to hold it.

The transparent glazed nose of the helicopter pulled up into the indifferent (that he
was in trouble!) Pale blue winter sky, then rushed to the rolled airfield snow, bright
orange planes based in the vicinity of the polar aviation, some cars, skating rinks,
sheds - under me flickered already outskirts of the airfield.

I was very busy in these seconds, but I can imagine the fear that Miles remained in
the parking lot during my cockpits, Baikalov, lead engineer German Vladimirovich
Remizov and mechanic Viktor Vasilievich Makarov - my colleague in the TsAGI flight
test department. It was on the rights of an old acquaintance that he later told me
more frankly than anyone else that they thought about this approach in general and
the personality of the pilot who performed it in particular.

But the tricks did not last long. In the end, I caught the right pace and scope of work
with the pen — indeed, on the move it turned out to be much more understandable
than hanging — and I brought the car in due obedience.

Back — over the same sheds, skating rinks, cars, and airplanes that were now
swimming under me in reverse order — I flew to the parking lot quite decently,
carefully building a route around the perimeter of the airfield. Attention now sufficed
even for such aesthetic excesses as the exact adherence to a constant height.

Not reaching the parking lot a little, I finally became impudent and allowed myself to
go on a small provocation: by an energetic movement of the handle I intentionally
drove the car back into swing mode. He drove and immediately, allowing her to roll
over once from side to side, he stopped the hesitation. Yes, that means it’s not an
accident that she finally obeyed me two minutes ago. It seems that I caught how to
control a helicopter: anticipating its own aspirations with small, energetic
movements.

After this approach, which was well remembered to me, the first departure was
simple. I made a large circle at a height of one hundred to one hundred and fifty
meters around the airfield, walked over the greenish ice of a reservoir with many
fishermen frozen over the holes, turned around a star-crowned (near it turned out to
be unexpectedly large) spire on the river station building, made a complete closed
turn and went to landing.

Normal flights began on the test program.

From time to time, the helicopter presented surprises - fortunately, relatively

small. Especially expeditiously - without a moment of delay - he punished me for
trying automatically, without thinking, to apply the usual aircraft control techniques
to him. Once upon a descent, when there were three meters left to the ground, a light
gust of wind that came in from behind gave the car a little forward. To fend off this
movement, I took the control knob a little on myself, purely reflexively, in an airplane
way. The helicopter obediently backed up like a cancer back, and then fell down so
vigorously and fucked so hard on the ground that I don’t know as soon as the landing
gear could withstand! I overlooked that in a similar situation the helicopter behaves
diametrically opposite to the plane.

It turns out that not every automatism is useful!

***

And then the day came when the work was finished. The entire design bureau
gathered in the largest of the few premises occupied by him at that time. In the
labyrinth of drawing machines - kulmans - people sat on chairs, benches, even
tables. Those who did not have enough space stood along the walls. Violet winter
twilight thickened behind dusty, small-caged glass windows, but the room was bright
and even seemed warm from the many bright lamps lit above the tables. However, of
course, no lamps were warming us this evening! All present were swept by a real
emotional upsurge. But how could it be otherwise after all that the young team had to
overcome before gathering for such a solemn occasion ?!

Behind were months of intense work - from morning to late evening - work,
exhausting rummages, annoying accident of the first car, a full range of difficulties -
from purely technical to purely diplomatic (it turns out that the business cannot do
without them, especially in the early days of the young only claiming its place under
the sun of the organization).

The company still made its own helicopter!

But he, this helicopter, in turn, “made” the company. Her right to exist has been
convincingly proven.

“Comrades,” said the chief designer, “today is a happy day for us: the flight tests of
our car have been successfully completed ...”

He talked about the test results and future plans of the Design Bureau, reminded the
facts, called names. He was listened with emotion, which was not difficult to
understand.

When something new is needed that people need — more perfect than its
predecessors, a car, a house, a bridge, a road, a book, a picture — the authors of this
new always experience almost the most powerful of all possible types of human
satisfaction. In aviation, the new is not created solely contrary to the common
misconception. A new plane is not a drawing or a poem. For his birth, not one
ingenious insight is needed, but the hard creative work of many people. And each of
them (of course, far from to the same extent) legally experiences this powerful sense
of author's - or rather, co-author's - satisfaction. I have experienced it more than once
in my life, and I.

But that evening I felt not only involvement, albeit in the smallest degree, in the birth
of a new machine, but also the usefulness of my work for the formation of a young
creative team. This is even more than contributing to the creation of an airplane or a
helicopter: whatever you say, there are much less viable design bureaus in nature
than just successful types of aircraft.
However, at this meeting I remember, the holidays did not end. True, what should
have followed them looked festive only outwardly, but in essence it was not easy,
sometimes even insidious, but, unfortunately, in real life, useless work.

It was about the so-called ostentatious, that is, demonstration flights.

Pilots, mechanics, and almost all other aviation experts unanimously dislike them. I
do not presume to precisely formulate the reason for this hostility. Perhaps the
annoying people of the case are the lack of visible, concrete benefits from such flights.

Perhaps a role is played by the not very favorable statistics of incidents, for some
reason occurring on ostentatious flights relatively more often than on most others, -
the death of Grinchik on the first jet MiG was still fresh in everyone's memory.

One way or another, the antipathy to this type of flight work is evident. And one of
the mechanics of our helicopter frankly expressed it, reacting to the news of the
upcoming flights with a grumbling statement:

- Well, hold on, guys: a big window dress is waiting for us!

He did not want to recognize any positive effect from such diplomatic events.

However, the upcoming "window dressing" did not have a direct relationship with
me. The leadership of the Design Bureau decided that demonstration flights should
be carried out on their own, without the Vikings. And the business for which I was
seconded to the Design Bureau - ninety-three flights under the helicopter test
program - was completed.

I lingered a bit just so that during the first of a series of ostentatious flights to see
what a helicopter looks like in the air: I had not had such an opportunity before, for
obvious reasons. I got the pleasure of this sight: a slender, dragonfly-like machine,
glittering anodized golden sides, with vigorous chirping leisurely soared over the
airfield.

After that, I heartily said goodbye to everyone - young and old - by the KB employees
and went home, having every reason to believe that this helicopter was forever gone
from my life.

However, fate - a capricious aviation fate - decided otherwise.

Two weeks later, the flight director of the institute urgently called me to my place.

“You see, Mark,” he began, “I told you that you should not ask for this super-modern
technique in vain.” Unfortunately, I was right.

- And what happened?

- There was a disaster. Just called: your helicopter crashed ... Matvey died ...
It turned out that Baikalov managed to make fourteen flights on this machine. The
last of them - the fourteenth - was no longer ostentatious, but distillation. Taking off
from the airfield, where the tests were carried out, the pilot was supposed to land a
helicopter at the airport of customers. And takeoff and the whole flight went
fine. Arriving at the destination, the helicopter made another circle, then flew up to
the designated parking lot, hovered at a height of about a hundred meters above it
and was already slowly descending vertically, when suddenly - once again this ill-
fated “suddenly”! - sharply threw his long dragonfly tail to the side, landed on its side
and, describing a half-turn of a steep spiral, crashed into the ground ...

***

And then again the emergency commission.

More than once I had to participate in their work - perhaps the most difficult of all
existing in aviation.

The emergency commission must establish the causes of the accident in order to
exclude them in the future. To do this is sometimes very difficult. Far from always
from the car that crashed, there is enough left to judge the reasons that led to its
death. Sometimes there are no living witnesses of what happened ... One could talk
about many cases in which the investigation of the causes of the next catastrophe was
almost detective in nature, which made one recall the great detective Sherlock
Holmes and his methods of investigating crimes that struck young minds.

When the cause of the incident is established, you must name the specific culprit
(sometimes this is required even in cases where the cause of the incident is not
established). And this is not always easy - the problem ceases to be abstractly
technical and begins to offend (sometimes very sensitively!) The living interests of
living people. I faced this subtle ethical and diplomatic problem in the very first
emergency commission, which I could say, at the dawn of my testing activities.

The TsAGI flight test department was relocated to a new airfield specially built for it -
spacious, comfortable, with wide concrete runways and even a river washing it from
one side, where you could run swimming between flights - almost “without
interruption from production” .

Everything was very good in the new place, but it - for that and the new one - had to
be mastered. For the pilot, this meant first of all, in detail, to the last detail, to study
the area of the airfield, starting with the nearest approaches. On one of these
approaches, a bright yellow spot of fresh sand mining closely bordered on our new
airfield.

One fine day along the border of the aerodrome in this place, without telling us
anything, we installed poles for the future telephone line.

Freshly hewn wooden timber poles that had not had time to darken from the air were
completely invisible - they were lost on the background of the same golden yellow
sand.
The first to be convinced of the fact of their existence was G.M. Shiyanov -
subsequently one of the most prominent Soviet testers, but at that time still very
young, not much less green than me, a pilot.

Entering the landing on the I-153 fighter, he just before the ground, on leveling, felt a
sharp blow from which the whole machine started, swayed and was kept in obedience
only thanks to the energetic actions of the pilot. The reason for this blow was
immediately revealed - the plane hit the unfortunate pillar with the end of the lower
right wing. True, Shiyanov did an excellent job of landing the damaged fighter, and
the case was far more prosperous than it could have been.

But the plane somehow turned out to be damaged, and in accordance with the
provisions in force on this subject, an emergency commission had to be appointed. It
was approved by Alexander Petrovich Chernavsky as its chairman, and the operating
engineer Nikolai Petrovich Suvirov and me as members.

There was no particular need to delve into the study of the direct and indirect causes
of the accident: both were obvious. Difficulties began when it came to drafting the
emergency act, and, in particular, the point at which the specific culprit of the
incident should be indicated.

In essence, of course, the person who ordered to install these damn pillars in such an
unsuitable place was to blame. But we could not indicate this person in the column
“Specific culprit”, if only because we could not find out exactly who gave such an
order. We even wanted to drive Yura Shiyanov into this column! Of course, we
understood that he did not notice the pillar. But probably none of us would have
noticed him. It is not so easy to discern a yellow pillar in front of the earth against a
background of yellow sand. And this damned pillar was not supposed to stick out in
the approach strip near the very border of the airfield!

And we thought up, as it seemed to us, an absolutely brilliant diplomatic move. In the
column “Specific culprit” was written: “Downward air flow” ...

Good two years - until the very beginning of the war - then this downward stream
followed me! A rare meeting did without mentioning my humble person as deeply
mired in rotten liberalism, nepotism, unscrupulousness and other sins, only because
of which, it turns out, until then our glorious team could end the accident! What can I
say, if we ignore the form of these reproaches and the enviable constancy with which
they were pronounced for a long time, there were certainly grounds for them. We
have slandered the downward flow in vain.

But it is very difficult indeed to name the culprit of the incident quite often,
regardless of additional psychological circumstances.

Somehow the accident of one fighter was sorted out. When it came to the delicate
points of distribution of personal responsibility, the chairman of the commission,
uncomfortably cringing, suggested:

“Well, let's proceed, as Ostap Bender said, to the materialization of spirits and the
distribution of elephants? ..
- And what is there especially to materialize and distribute? - threw in response to
this the most lively (although hardly the most thoughtful) of those present. - The
thing is clear: a mistake in piloting! ..

“A mistake in piloting ...” And what is this, in essence, such? We all know perfectly
well what an arithmetic error is: two, two, five, so to speak. Roughly imagine the
essence of the error of a sapper who, as you know, makes a mistake once in a
lifetime. We are fairly confident in judging everyday mistakes (though mostly not
about our own, but made by other people): from assessing the weather forecast for
tomorrow to choosing a worthy life partner.

But what is a pilot’s mistake?

You should not think that it is simply the wrong choice of one of two possible options
for action. Let's say flying in one direction instead of the other, or shifting the landing
gear lever, when you would have to grasp the flap cleaning lever.

Of course, pilots also have such errors, but very rarely. They do not make the weather
a long list of accidents attributed to this convenient column.

More often, the so-called pilot error is completely different.

It is known that accuracy is a purely relative category. Absolute accuracy anywhere -

not in everyday life, not in science, nor in technology - is unattainable. In each
individual case, we can only talk about the magnitude of the permissible error, within
which we believe the necessary degree of accuracy is observed. We believe that we
arrived at the appointed place just in time if we were late, say, for a few seconds, and
we said that we were exactly in the middle of the room, even if we deviated from this
middle by several millimeters. It would never occur to anyone to demand from the
stove-maker the same accuracy as from the watchmaker.

So, the whole thing is how large a mistake can be made without prejudice to the result
of the case. And of course, in how capable a person (or machine - everything said can
rightfully be attributed to it) to stay within the realistically feasible “band” of
permissible errors, which we therefore do not consider to be errors. Only after going
beyond this “band” does an error begin in the usual, non-mathematical sense of the
word.

To explain all this to the emergency commission would be too long. Instead, one of its
members — the test pilot himself — simply asked:

- A pilot error? And what exactly was it expressed in?

- How in what? The instructions clearly state that the pilot should not allow banks
exceeding ...

- Do you want me to write instructions on how to walk in a circus on a tightrope? To

do this, all you need is to keep the center of gravity of your body in a vertical plane
passing through the stretched rope. I’ll write and send you to the circus: if you please,
go! And if you fall, I’ll say that they themselves violated the instructions. After all, it is
“clearly stated” in it ...

And the question was resolved: the commission’s act indicated the excessive “rigor” of
the apparatus and the need to simplify the technique of piloting it. There was not a
word about the pilot’s mistake.

But the catastrophe of M.K. Baykalova did not cause such a heated debate. There was
nothing to argue about. The pilot obviously did not have to blame. The cause of the
disaster was the destruction of the tail rotor shaft.

The whole story of destruction was literally written at the fracture site. Here the root
cause of the trouble blackens - a small, almost point-wise destruction of the
material. The first sections that have already darkened its sections depart from it in
both directions along the crack section. Then, as it were, by steps, there are
increasingly lighter traces of its further spread and, finally, a completely fresh white
fracture - the destruction of a thin bridge on which the shaft was held until the last
moment.

Death was in wait for this helicopter from the very beginning.

No one could predict on what flight this will happen: first, tenth, fortieth, hundredth?

It happened at one hundred and seventh ...

Today, such a disaster is almost impossible - modern flaw detection methods reliably
guarantee this.

And even then - it cost the shaft, which has already withstood many hours of
operation, to endure at least a few tens of seconds remaining before the landing, and
everything would have worked out well. The shaft, of course, in one way or another
would inevitably burst, but it would have happened on the ground, from the shock
load at the time of the next launch. The catastrophe would not have taken place.

***

But the helicopter survived. Of course, not the very instance that crashed on this
unlucky day, but its many brothers, or, if you want, descendants - serial Mi-1s that
flew for many years in our Air Force, in civil aviation, even in flying clubs.

About ten years after the take-off of the first Mi-1, its passenger modification, called
the Moskvich, was released. Then came a helicopter with gas turbine engines - Mi-2,
built as a development of the design of the same Mi-1.

Long life turned out in this car!

Many talented people - scientists, designers, engineers - had a hand in the formation
of the domestic helicopter industry. Test pilots of rotorcraft S.G. Brovtsev,
V.V. Vinitsky, Yu.A. Garnayev, M.D. Gurov, D.K. Efremov, R.I. Kaprelyan,
V.P. Koloshenko, E.F. Milyutichev, G.A. Tinyakov.
I had the opportunity to experience in my life only ... one and a half helicopters. Yes,
yes, exactly one and a half!

Six months after the end of the Mi-1 tests, this time, as a "certified" helicopter pilot, I
received an offer to start a new machine - the Yak-100 - of the same layout and almost
the same size as my recent godson.

Unfortunately, I did not manage to bring these tests to the end. The circumstances
unexpectedly developed so that for the first time in my life I was forced to abandon
the work I had begun halfway. A vague one went on, lasting several years and ending
only after the fifty-third year, the streak in my (and not just mine) biography.

However, not about that now.

One way or another, I had to test another “half-helicopter”. And I do not regret it, if
only because the joint work on these tests served as the occasion for our first
acquaintance with the lead designer of this helicopter Igor Aleksandrovich Erlich, an
acquaintance that eventually turned into a strong friendship.

I have not met before this other designer who, with such deep, unobtrusive attention
and understanding, perceived every thought, observation, even a petty private
comment from any of his employees, not to mention a leading pilot. This does not
mean, of course, that he necessarily agreed with them. But he invariably took
everything that came from those around him into processing with all the strength of
his keen analytical mind and with such bona fide excitement, as if it were his own
thoughts. Democracy of thought is one of the rarest forms of manifestation of
democracy. It is difficult to overestimate the harm that the position of the leader
inflicts on the case, recognizing only the monopoly right to utter something new.

Of course, not only this property - the ability to listen to people - determines the
appearance of the designer. But it more than any other was manifested in the
communication of Erlich with us - participants in helicopter flight tests.

For some reason, in our literature and dramaturgy, two main types of scientists and
technicians flourish. One is terribly talented, he knows everything, he can do
everything, but he doesn’t listen to anyone and personally, so to speak, from his own
gut gives out valuable ideas one after another. The second one is sneaky and
mediocre, unable to come up with anything himself, and therefore prowls - in a more
or less obvious way for others - through the brains of his colleagues, from which for
petty purposes (dissertation, award, etc.) and extracts progressive ideas .

In life, more often than not it happens. The talent of a great designer is

multicomponent. Own high creative potential, of course, is one of these components,
but you will not go far on it alone. No less needed and, so to speak, a talent for
perceiving all the progressive, perspective, or at least lurking in itself the notorious
rational grain that is worn around. Anyway, one person, even if he has seven spans in
his forehead, is physically unable to make those thousands and tens of thousands of
creative finds, without which it would not be possible to create a modern machine. In
Erlich, I saw a combination of both of these features of a real designer: both my own
creative potential and a keenly developed sense of everything progressive.
Helicopters at that time barely reached the broad road of mass production
operation. Other aircraft - the same aircraft, for example - had several decades of
odds in front of them. And of course, in order to go this route at an accelerated pace,
it was necessary first of all to realize that what is good in helicopters and what is bad.

It would seem that all true friends of helicopters should actively strive for such an
arrangement of points over the "i", and only the enemies of helicopter engineering
could resist it (if, of course, there were such).

Alas, in reality, everything happened differently. Life has taught me yet another

lesson about how dangerous it is to follow the expensive formal logic too
straightforwardly.

The main opponents of attempts to compile a register of the main sins of stability and
controllability of helicopters were ... the most active enthusiasts of this type of
aircraft!

It seemed to them that every word of criticism addressed to their beloved offspring
would do terrible harm to a new, barely getting on its feet business, undermine the
trust in it from someone “upstairs” and throw our helicopter industry back from its
newly won starting position.

This was not the first (and far from the last) case in which I had the opportunity to
see how much harm his enthusiasts can do to their beloved business. They definitely
need some kind of counterbalance, at least in the form of “skeptics” -carriers of a
critical element in order to soberly, calmly, really objectively understand all the pros
and cons of the new business.

Unfortunately, in the case in question, there were very few such truly objective
people. Prominent aerodynamics already in those years, experts in the theory of
propellers and rotorcraft L.S. Wildgrube and B.Ya. Stallions, the same I.A. Erlich -
that’s probably all.

However, we will not be too strict to judge their then opponents. Fear of truth is a
weakness inherent not only to them alone ...

***

Nowadays - not only at the airport, but also on a city street or a rural road - few
people stop and put their heads up to look at a flying helicopter.

However, turning into everyday life is far from any exotic thing.

There were many aircraft that, having been born extraordinary, so extraordinary (if
not forever, then at least for a long time) remained.

I met one of these devices, though only from the outside, attentively, in the very first
year after I entered the TsAGI flight test department.
Some strange structure was pulled out of the hangar onto the airfield - an oval or,
more precisely, a pear-shaped, disk cut in bright red color lying flat on three rather
slender legs of the chassis. A motor was attached to the front of the drive (in fact, this
alone allowed us to call some part of it “front”). A small scallop of vertical plumage
was stuck on the opposite side. And in the middle there was a recess shielded by a
transparent visor - the cockpit.

Apparently, the strange structure was intended to fly.

What nicknames were not given to him: “damn”, “bug”, “flounder”, even “saucer”
(thus, the term “flying saucers” does not have to be considered a post-war
invention)! However, the real name of this device, given to him by the designer, so to
say, at birth, was - “Arrow”.

Before that, I had to see the so-called tailless planes. My friend, an aviation engineer
Igor Kostenko, from his youth was fond of designing tailless planes, gliders in flying
models. Many years later, in the harsh forty-second year, fate threw him into a former
furniture factory, which was transferred to the manufacture of military products -
wooden tails for Il-2 attack aircraft.

“Just think what an evil mockery!” - Igor complained then. “All my life I have been
drawn to planes without tails, but I have to do ... tails without planes!”

But the “pancake” is a light-engine aircraft with a round wing in plan design
A.S. Moskaleva - was not only tailless, but also, so to speak, bodyless and even almost
wingless - in any case, I had never seen wings of this shape before.

One by one, our pilots, beginning with the luminaries and ending with home-grown
youth, climbed into the cockpit of this interesting airplane, started the engine and
rushed along the airfield. A red disk glistening in the sun glided over white, freshly
fallen snow. It was very beautiful, but ... to no avail.

To no avail because in the end the plane is made in order to fly, and not run on the
ground. But the aspirations of the machine to come off the ground, none of those who
got into its cab just did not detect.

“It will not fly,” the pilots decided with a majority of votes.

But the "damn" flew.

Young at that time tester N.S. Rybko, angry at the wayward device, still tore it from
the runway! After making a few short approaches and making sure that the car keeps
in the air and obeys the steering wheels, Rybko one day, once again in the air, did not
immediately remove the gas, but continued, increasing speed, stubbornly driving the
car forward. Five seconds, ten, fifteen ... The plane quite easily gained several meters
in height, but something did not want to go higher.

The distance from the earth increased literally in centimeters - for pilots this is called
not to gain, but to "scrape" the height. The spectators who remained at the hangar
saw how a small red circle was rapidly approaching the border of the airfield, behind
which a solid, dark forest stood behind a solid wall. It’s too late to clean the gas. A few
more seconds - and the car will crash into the trees.

It is impossible, looking at a flying airplane in the tail, from such a distance to

accurately determine how many meters it still remains to an obstacle. What will
happen earlier - will it cover this distance or scratch a height, at least half a wheel
larger than that of the trees standing in its way?

These seconds went a long time. It seemed to me already that the matter was bad -
now the car will crash into the tops!

But no! She flew - or rather crawled - through them. She crawled tightly, so that only
the needles of the branches disturbed by the air stream flashed in the sun.

We all sighed in noisy chorus: it turns out that for the last half minute none of those
who watched this difficult take-off were breathing.

However, this was not a sigh of final relief. Having escaped from the last forces to the
height of the forest, to go further the “pancake” categorically refused and quickly
disappeared behind the toothed picket fence of trees. There was no radio
communication with a single-seat aircraft in those days. Yes, even if it were, it was
unlikely that the pilot would engage in conversations at that moment. Nothing could
distract him from a desperate struggle for centimeters of height.

... The message came by phone - Rybko landed safely in Tushino. He, barely holding
on to obstacles in a straight flight, rightly did not risk introducing the car into a U-
turn. You could only fly forward. Fortunately, there, in front and a little to the right,
there was a Tushino airfield, and when he saw it, the pilot, without thinking twice,
made a landing, since the “damn” came down incomparably more willingly than
agreed to go up.

- Not so much I flew to this airfield, but the airfield (thanks to him!) Itself turned up
under me, - then Kolya commented on his route, which was somewhat unusual for
the first flight.

And Chernavsky specified:

- A flight with a landing at another airport is called, according to the instructions, a

flight ... Look, comrades, the “damn” already goes on flights! ..

It was possible to joke - Rybko sat alive and healthy among us.

However, the story did not end there. It would seem that all the data is available, so
that the tests of the aircraft that turned out to be so obstinate immediately and
close. But it remained unclear what caused such a decisive antipathy to moving away
from the earth near the apparatus, which was essentially specially designed for this
purpose. What's the matter? Did the designer's calculations fail to
materialize? Suppose, but not in this case, to limit ourselves to the thoughtful “all the
worse for calculations”. After all, they will be used more than once in the creation of
the following machines. It is imperative to find where the error is. What exactly is
“worse for calculations”?

And for this you need to fly.

Fly, no matter how difficult it is. Sometimes a poorly flying machine is even more
interesting for the future aviation than the most successful one.

And Rybko continued to test the "pancake".

Soon the plane was transported to a huge natural airfield - the frozen Lake Pereslavl,
over which you could fly straight without turning for at least half an hour and at the
same time have the opportunity at any time, if necessary, to land immediately.

Of course, flying was still difficult. New is always difficult.

But the results fully paid for all the anxieties, troubles and energy spent by the
participants in the work, and first of all by Nikolai Stepanovich Rybko.

"Damn" flew!

He vigorously climbed to a mile and a half height, freely turned in any direction, took
off, sat down - in a word, regularly did everything that was supposed to be for a
decent, self-respecting airplane.

The fact was that at first they flew on this machine ... incorrectly. It turned out that all
its qualities flourish at unusually large angles of attack - in such a bulged upward
position, from which planes with a normal wing and elongation would immediately
fall into a tailspin.

All this was fully confirmed in the purge of wings of small elongation in wind
tunnels. The only thing that remains a mystery to me to this day is why flights
preceded purges, and not vice versa.

The benefits of learning new things almost never come out right away. But sooner or
later her time will come!

Now, watching as modern supersonic airplanes with wings of small elongation take
off and land high on their noses up to the sky, I remember N. S.'s bold, innovative
flights every time. Rybko on a small experimental airplane A.S. Moskalev.

In the end, exotics bore fruit: concrete, real, suitable for everyday use.

Moreover: today there exist and successfully fly airplanes, even in shape very similar
to the “Arrow” flying thirty years ago, the first appearance of which at the test airfield
caused such fun among many of its inhabitants. New is always unusual. But how
promising it is - it is far from always possible to figure it out right at first sight. And -
not everyone ...

***
In the last months of the war, fragmentary rumors began to reach us that a rocket
engine, that is, a liquid-propellant rocket engine (LRE), was built and flies in
Germany, a plane similar to ours, in which a test pilot flew and died in the forty-
second year G.Ya. Bahchivanji.

These rumors quickly grew into details. It turned out that the machine we are
interested in is called the Messerschmitt-163, that it has a swept wing, is devoid of
horizontal tail and the wheel chassis mounted on it is not retractable, but is reset
immediately after take-off, landing on a small final ski.

In general, the apparatus in all respects should have been very interesting.

Several front-line pilots even saw the Me-163 in the air.

And finally, a trophy copy of this unlike any other - again exotic! - the plane is
standing in front of you. The stability and controllability of such a machine were
worth exploring in detail.

The task was complicated by the fact that unforeseen difficulties arose with the
development of the Walter engine installed on the Me-163. At first, it seemed that it
was worth driving him away at the stand, working off the launch, trying on different
modes, and you could go into the air with him. But all this was easier said than done!

To begin with, we did not have fuel for the captive engine. He worked on hydrogen
peroxide, and he devoured this amount of food that wasn’t accepted by us in such a
quantity that to satisfy his needs we would have to specifically expand the factory
production of peroxide, not to mention the real threat of a sharp reduction in the
number of such a necessary population as blondes!

So, the engine was delayed.

FLIGHT ENGINEERING AND FLIGHT

ETHICS
FLIGHT ENGINEERING AND FLIGHT ETHICS

The plane was down quickly and inevitably.

There was a little over a kilometer to the ground. At this altitude, it is especially
noticeable as the horizon approaches. His line takes on a familiar, earthly clarity. In
the stratosphere, even in clear weather, the horizon is usually not visible: it is so far
away that it is lost somewhere beyond the distance of the earth in a haze and turns
into a wide, uncertain color, a muddy belt, below which is the earth, and above it is
the sky. Going down from the height, the pilot sees how this belt narrows and here -
just somewhere around a thousand - one thousand five hundred meters - it turns
back into a line.

The limits of the visible are rapidly shrinking. But on the other hand, this visible one
grows in size, concretizes, grows in details invisible from a height: crawling cars and
trains, smoky sections - spots of civilization - near factories and plants, glare of light
reflected in glass. Even roads that just seemed thin lines take on a second dimension -
width.

The earth comes to life.

And no matter how much you fly, this return from uninhabited heights to living land
never goes unnoticed, each time it causes some kind of warm movement in the soul of
the pilot.

Every time, but not today.

Today, the car is not going down as usual. I hear no intermittent exhaust from a gas
engine. There is no usual small tremor on the control handle. A dense air stream
rushing behind the glass of the cabin rustles - and nothing more. Like a glider.

The plane is really going down like a glider. Only, unfortunately, many times
faster! The motor is off, the screw does not give traction and rotates idle, like a
chickenpox, from an oncoming air stream.

Yes, now the pilot is not up to the beauties of nature. Of all that opens below, he is
only interested in one thing: the airfield, in the direction to which he plans. And just
one thought revolves in my head: “Will I last or not?”

At first, immediately after turning off the engine, it seemed that there was enough
headroom to plan for the airfield. Then suddenly doubts arose. After some time, they
again disappeared: “No, I will. Without excess reserves, but, it seems, I will hold out.
”

Unfortunately, there are no instruments that accurately show the point on the earth’s
surface where the gliding plane will land. We have to evaluate the state of things by
eye. And the eye - a device, alas, is not always reliable!

It is no wonder that the pilot’s confidence in the outcome of the case underwent so
many hesitations: “Will I reach it or not?”

The pilot's doubts this time were especially grave.

And there was a reason for it: the fact is that the motor today, in essence, did not fail -
it did not collapse, it did not jam, and it did not spontaneously drop traction. The
pilot himself turned it off. He turned off the fuel valve, removed the gas sector,
extended his left hand to the ignition switch - and turned it off. He made this decision
because he had found, as yet indirectly, indisputably alarming symptoms in the
readings of instruments that control the operation of the motor: not the temperature
that would rely on this mode, not such pressure. Nothing has yet gone beyond the
permissible, but has clearly moved towards these limits.

And the motor is new, experienced. For the sake of his tests, flights are carried out
throughout the program. To screw such a motor is a big trouble.

But turning it off for no reason at all means exposing the entire aircraft, along with a
precious prototype engine, to the risk of an emergency landing. There is a risk - and
there is a risk. Where is he less?

It’s not easy to make a decision under such circumstances! With your own hand, turn
off a healthy, efficient, exactly humming motor! There is something unnatural in
this. Something similar to the actions of a doctor who, having examined a seemingly
perfectly healthy, flowering, no-complaining person, resolutely puts him on the
operating table. She does it without hiding that the operation can end tragically, but
that if she refuses it, the probability of a tragic outcome will be even greater. When
you find out about such a case, every time something in the subconscious mind
actively protests: “Don't! Leave it as it is! After all, in some explicit form, nothing bad
has happened! .. "

I don’t know what the doctor making such a decision is experiencing. I think it is
unlikely that he maintains the same serene inner calm that he shows to the patient
and his relatives.

In any case, the pilot does not save. A worm of doubt gnaws at his soul: what if the
appliances lie? It happens! And you, having so easily believed them, turn off a
serviceable, innocent motor! And it’s good if the case ends only in an interrupted
mission that has not been fully completed: they will inspect the engine on the ground,
make sure that everything is in order, smile: “Oh, you old reinsurer!” - and in an hour
you are again in the air on the same machine .

And what if an emergency landing outside the airfield? As they say, for no reason,
practically without any reason, a broken or at least seriously damaged aircraft? Just
thinking about it makes me feel cold!

On the day in question, the last option - a broken car for no reason at all -
unexpectedly turned out to be very real: when the earth was already very close and
there was no more than a minute left before it came into contact (wherever and how it
happened), the pilot suddenly saw that he wasn’t - not enough! Just a little - some few
hundred meters - but does not hold out.

True, he had at his disposal an excellent, most seemingly natural way to avoid an
emergency landing outside the airfield: turn on the engine again for some ten to
fifteen seconds. But he worked completely flawlessly until the moment of shutdown -
he will stretch, of course, these few seconds.

The pilot's hand itself reached for the ignition switch. One easy movement, and an
unwritten flight test commandment - to do everything possible and impossible, but
put the car on the airfield - will be fulfilled.
***

Dragging a wounded car to the airfield, regardless of considerations of the well-being

of my own person, or anything else - I saw this tradition of real testers on a number of
brilliant examples and fully appreciated it as soon as I got into the TsAGI flight test
department.

Prior to this, while studying at the institute and flying in an aero club, I, a regular
reader of newspapers, took seriously the formula expressed by Stalin and repeatedly
repeated in print: “The life of a pilot is dearer to us than any car.” And although very
soon after the birth of this spectacular formula, the surrounding reality began to give
more and more reasons to doubt the unshakable value of the Human person, I did
not immediately get rid of the hypnosis of endless repetitions - “more expensive than
any machine” - in many articles, speeches, reports. Now, of course, I would be
pleased to portray myself in my youth more intelligent and insightful than it actually
was, but, alas, the facts remain facts.

Yes, and when I got to TsAGI, as a young man, at first I thought not about the degree
of sincerity of the said dictum, but only about the very concept of “machine
value”. However, this “only” turned out to be very significant.

One by one, examples of the selfless struggle of a test pilot to save an experienced
aircraft in trouble appeared before me. I already talked about this case at the
beginning of my notes - about how test pilot I.F. Kozlov brilliantly brought to his
airfield and safely landed an experienced fighter, which was dilapidated in the air. It
was difficult, very difficult to save this plane. And of course, if you follow the official
formula on the comparative value of man and machine, Ivan Frolovich should,
without any hesitation, jump on a parachute. But he acted differently, moreover, his
course of action was strongly approved by all those around him.

No, there was clearly something wrong! It seemed self-evident that "human life is
dearer to us ..." here did not have a course or, in any case, was used far from
unconditionally.

I remember listening to the story with an open mouth about the extraordinary
landing of Kozlov, I felt a whole complex of feelings: and, of course, the natural
admiration for the courage and skill of the pilot, and regret that I did not see this
landing with my own eyes and now I am forced to be content with eyewitness
accounts (I have not yet I suspected then that I would see enough - both from the
outside and “from the inside” - of such cases and would quickly cease to perceive
them with calf enthusiasm), and, finally, some surprise. Surprise - for the same
reason: because of the striking contradiction between the way I was taught to think
and the way things were in real life.

Before the ability, or, to begin with, at least the need to think about everything in life
on your own, you still had to grow - and for each of us, and society as a whole.

... But maybe Kozlov’s act is an exception?

No, life threw up more and more new facts. Here masterfully planted a heavy car on
one wheel with an unreleased second S. A. Basketmen. Here is A.I. Zhukov, having
lost several kilometers in unsuccessful attempts to pull out a stubborn fighter from a
corkscrew, finally tore it literally a few tens of meters from the ground. Here is
Yu.K. Stankevich dragged on a single engine hundreds of kilometers to his airfield a
twin-engine aircraft, according to all reports, on one engine generally does not fly
horizontally.

In a word, these were no longer special cases.

It was a tradition, a rule, a norm of behavior.

Where did she come from? Perhaps test pilots followed this norm because they
simply did not attach the proper price to their own lives? Suffered from atrophy of the
instinct of self-preservation inherent in all living things? Reached for suicide?

Of course not! For all my youthful superficiality of thinking, I quickly realized

this. The situation was different: the testers of that time (as, incidentally, all
subsequent generations of this profession) clearly felt that the price of an
experimental or experimental machine is not only a monetary concept (although in
monetary terms it draws many millions!). Moreover, this price is not primarily
monetary. It focuses on the long (sometimes long-term) hard work of a large team, it
laid the pace of development of our aviation.

If you think about it, it’s also people's lives: lives spent on some business now, lives
saved (or, conversely, lost in vain) in future battles. This is already commensurate
with the fate of the crew of the experimental vehicle, or even less than one test
pilot. The place of general, albeit very humanistic, phrases was occupied by
calculation. The calculation may be cruel, but reasonable. So in a battle where some
kind of human loss is somehow inevitable, the commander’s task is to minimize them
and, in any case, never refuse to save a few lives, giving one in return.

Cruel arithmetic - the reader will say. Cruel and unlawful! Every human life is
priceless, and it’s immoral to calculate how many other lives you can give it away ...
But there is nothing to be done: there are circumstances that force one not to shy
from following this terrible logic. What should we do, say, for a commander who is
withdrawing his unit from the enemy environment and realizing that this will succeed
only if a small group of cover for retreat is left? A group that is practically doomed ...
Being a humanist in practice is sometimes much more difficult than in theory.

I don’t know if my senior comrades - TsAGI test pilots - were engaged in such
calculations. Most probably not. But in practice, each of them invariably followed
strict logic: in acute situations, think first of all about their crewmates, then - about
the experienced machine entrusted to him, and only last - about himself.

And - in full compliance with the laws of dialectics - in this seemingly thoroughly
rationalized, coldly-calculated mode of action, one can clearly see its own romance,
its pathos, its own beauty.

***
These categories - romance, beauty, pathos - reached the youth at that time without
fail. (As, however, in my deep conviction, they are now flawlessly reaching.) In any
case, the noble tradition of fighting for the car to the last opportunity - the first of
many standards of flying ethics that we encountered - was accepted by us, young
TsAGI pilots, instantly.

It is perceived with all my heart, but, alas, at first only with my soul! We could not
realize our full willingness to take the plane out of any dangerous situation,
regardless of the risk to our own life, for the simple reason that, as luck would have it,
none of us - neither Grinchik, nor Shuneiko, nor I have - in flight did not occur.

Of course, we perfectly understood that this was no accident. It’s just the tasks that
we performed and the planes that trusted us were so simple, reliable, and tested
many times before us that we only had to expect any complication as a rare and
unlikely accident.

But, of course, this did not last long. Everything came in due time.

Very soon, the desire to return to the aerodrome at any cost, having kept the car in
the form in which it turned out as a result of the accident itself in the air, became for
us the norm of behavior - not only, so to speak, in theory, but also in practice . It
became at the behest of the soul (romance!) And, most importantly, at the behest of
the mind (all the same, because of the defect, since it exists, you won’t get away: if we
don’t figure it out now, it will cost us another time).

And in the case with the description of which this chapter began, the matter seemed
clear and easy to do: turn on the engine for a few seconds - and the car at the airport.

Everyone will say: the pilot did it!

***

Did you do it?

In the new experimental motor, for the sake of testing of which, in essence, all the
mess was brewed, some kind of defect clearly appeared. Which one is unknown. But
finding out is extremely important. And to find out, it is necessary to deliver the
motor to the ground without any additional damage. Additional damage here is about
the same as foreign substances thrown into a test tube in which a new, specially
studied chemical reaction takes place.

Turning the motor on for a few seconds is a simple matter. And the landing will be
"like in a pharmacy" - at your airport. And no little unpleasant consequences for the
pilot from this will not follow; probably even praise. They will say: "Well done." But in
a wounded engine, so many firewood breaks in these few seconds that the initial
damage literally drowns in the newly arisen. The design weakness will remain a
mystery.

And if, without touching the engine, to land a car with the retracted landing gear in a
snowy field, without reaching a few hundred meters to the airfield? What then?
Then - the emergency commission. Written report. Answers (also written; they are
somewhat elusively opposed to oral) to the tricky questions of the commission: how
did it happen that it did not hold out? Did you use all the features? Did you evaluate
the situation on time? Maybe it was possible, without turning on the motor, to get to
the airfield? (Of course, official representatives, of course, will not follow up with a
direct statement that they should have turned on the motor. Someone from the
colleagues will say this with a wave of evil.) In the end, even if the case goes without
formal penalties - a reprimand in an order, a decline in class or something like that -
there is no moral trauma: "I did not justify ..."

The tester faced a difficult moral dilemma in which technology and ethics were
intertwined so that try to unravel!

Moreover, unlike most tasks of this kind known to mankind, it was necessary to solve
it within a maximum of several seconds. Faced with a difficult moral problem, the
heroes of literary prose are supposed to spend a sleepless night, fill several ashtrays
with cigarette butts, write and break a dozen letters, and the next morning act
diametrically opposite to what was decided on that night. Alas, all this luxury is not
available to the pilot: a few seconds are left for the decision, and without the
possibility of “changing your mind” in the future.

And our friend solved this problem.

He put the plane "on its belly" in the snow, went through the ranks of all the troubles
posed in such cases, parted, albeit temporarily, with some part of its reputation that it
had won over the years of flight work, but gave the designers of the motor the
opportunity to find and fix the defect. I don’t presume to give an exact figure - how
many pilots of military and civil aviation remained alive or, in any case, escaped
accidents due to the fact that the new engine went into serial production without an
extra hidden flaw ...

This whole story did not happen to me, or even to the pilot I knew, at an airport far
from us. But, having learned about it, I felt that the ethical norm that had already
been established in my mind — by all means dragging a faulty car to the airfield —
knew the exceptions. Like any ethical category, upon closer examination it turned out
to be more complicated than it might seem at first glance.

***

As time went. And every other case of saving the tested machine from a seemingly
hopeless situation (and there are enough of such cases, I repeat) strengthened my
faith in expediency, moreover, the mandatory nature of such a test pilot’s
actions. Exceptions like the one just told just reinforced the rule.

But risk is called risk because it does not always turn into a happy ending. It
sometimes happened that, having tried all the means of saving the machine to no
avail, the pilot no longer had time to escape himself. And after each such incident,
especially at the beginning of my life in aviation, doubts crawled into my soul (a weak
human soul!): Was it worth giving life, so to speak, to no avail? Anyway, it was not
possible to save the plane, even at such a high price! ..
This always leads to bitter thoughts. True, in mature years, the conclusions from
these thoughts come out slightly different than in youth, but I will not get ahead of
myself.

Examples of the heroic but tragically ending battle of the crew for the life of the car
entrusted to him could be listed a lot. I’ll tell you about one of them.

The new experienced Tu-95 bomber - a huge ship with widely spaced arrow-shaped
wings - was not in the air for the first time. A good dozen flights on it were already left
behind. And the crew of the aircraft and its commander, test pilot Alexei Dmitrievich
Perelet, could hardly have expected any troubles in this flight. However, troubles -
and very serious ones - arose. The hands of the instruments controlling the operation
of one of the four powerful turboprop engines suddenly left their rightful places and
crawled closer and closer to the alarming red marks on the dials. After a few seconds,
the engine started to shake, slammed, thick smoke fell out of it, and a moment later
the flame burst out. Fire!

Flight Engineer Chernov immediately activated the fire system. The burning engine
from all sides doused with elastic streams of extinguishing agent. But the fire, having
calmed down for a few seconds, flared violently again, as soon as the cylinders with
extinguishing agent were empty. The flight boldly threw a heavy, non-maneuverable
car from one deep glide to another - maybe an oblique blow-off will blow a flame with
an oncoming air stream? Everything was in vain! The fire flared up. Here he has
already spread from the motor to the wing. This is a direct threat to the life of the
crew. And the flight gives the command: "Everyone to leave the car." Everyone -
except the flight engineer, without whom the pilot on such a large ship as without
hands, and, of course, except himself - the ship's commander. In a word, the
composition of those remaining on board in such cases is normal - let’s recall at least
test pilot A.G. Vasilchenko and flight engineer N.I.

Navigators, mechanics, experimenters, executing the Flight command, dropped their

emergency hatches, opened the doors of emergency exits and jumped
overboard. Their open parachutes with a white dotted line marked the path along
which the burning ship passed.

The second pilot asked the commander:

- Do I have to jump too?

And having heard the impatient: “Come on, come on, do not delay!”, Left the plane
with the others.

By the way, here's another moral problem: many of the ground and flying brothers
were inclined to later condemn the second pilot. To condemn, of course, not
administratively, but, so to speak, from the standpoint of ethics. He should not
supposedly be leaving his commander in trouble.

I do not know. Maybe it shouldn't. But I can’t say anything decisive. Moreover, I see

no reason to doubt that such was the desire of the Flight - to remove from the board
all those whom he could do without. To suggest here on his part some ostentatious
delicacy - something like persuading a welcoming hostess at the table, in response to
which a polite guest should moderately break down and take, say, an extra portion of
jam no earlier than after the third sentence - it is not necessary. After all, the ship's
commander did not order the same flight engineer to jump. And it is inconceivable to
imagine in such a situation any disputes with the commander on the topic of whether
or not to fulfill his order, whatever it may be. It’s a pity to spend precious time on
such a luxury - already running by the piece of account!

Almost always, while remaining in a car in distress, the first pilot tries to rafting off
the second one in advance. And no one ever reproaches the second for this. Especially
if his commander remains alive.

But Flight and Chernov did not survive. Already very close to the airfield, the burning
plane suddenly energetically went into a roll, and so, with one wing lifted up to the
sky, and the second dropped to the ground, crashed into the forest. I will not be
distracted by the analysis of the possible causes of this ominous heeling - most likely
the aileron control rods burned out. One way or another, the attempt to save the car
failed. The risk did not materialize. There is neither an experienced aircraft, nor two
of our comrades, remarkable aviators, Heroes of the Soviet Union A.D. Pereleta and
A.F. Chernova.

Is such a game worth the candle?

And yet, no matter how cruel it may be, you have to give a positive answer again and
again: yes, definitely worth it!

That is, of course, if one could know in advance when the desperate attempts of the
testers at all costs to save the car will succeed, and when they will not succeed, in the
latter case one should calmly throw the plane and save itself. But life, as a rule, does
not give such an opportunity - so to speak, to know where you will fall and to lay
straws.

Therefore, in some particular bitter cases, it is necessary to post factum that here the
struggle for the car was hopeless, and on the whole, as a general rule, to recognize
such a struggle as the norm of the tester’s behavior.

Sometimes this desire, ingrained in the flesh and blood of every true testator, led to
results, although not tragic, but still, to put it mildly, far from planned.

And regardless of the good intentions of the pilot, who, as you know, paved the road
to hell, the realization of this aspiration was not always awarded the subsequent
universal approval. Especially if the pilot’s actions were unsuccessful.

One of such cases occurred in my chapters and was remembered for a long time.

It happened at our test aerodrome in the first weeks of the war. Most of the test pilots
of the airdrome existed at that time in two faces: during the day they performed the
current test work, and at night carried out combat service in a specially formed night
fighter squadron flying on new high-speed aircraft, which were still poorly mastered
in conventional combat units. They slept “according to their abilities”: in fits and
starts, for two or three hours in the morning, in the evening, and even between
departures, and they were surprised to find that, unlike the information gathered in
the first grades of the school, the sum of places changes significantly! At least the sum
of hours of sleep.

***

One way or another, the pilots stuck out at the airport almost hopelessly, around the
clock. And on one quiet, clear evening, an air alert suddenly rang out. It was really “all
of a sudden”; observing the traditions of renowned German accuracy, fascist bombers
flew in only at night, almost always at the same time. Now they were not supposed to
appear.

What to do? The first natural reaction - to flee to the fighters of their combat
squadron and take off towards the enemy - shot through with a blank shot: the
fighters were not ready for battle; mechanics had just examined them, refueled them,
loaded their weapons, prepared for the night.

And then everyone immediately flashed a second thought, a second soul movement -
to save the experimental and experimental machines. To save in the simplest way: lift
them into the air, fly up on them! Moreover, according to unknown rumors, the
enemy’s planes went "directly at us." (We did not know then the well-known rule
according to which in war all the enemy’s planes go necessarily to us, not to mention
the dropped bombs that fly invariably directly at us. They only tear to the side ...)

Now, of course, the easiest way to say that in all this was something of a
panic. Probably, without some elements of this unpleasant state that evening, indeed,
the matter was not complete. But we must not forget how virgin inexperienced we
were then in all military matters! And the second: that anxiety - albeit close to panic -
did not seize our souls, so to speak, in terms of worries about our own safety (if that
were the case, the whole brave team, without thinking twice, would simply burst into
cover). Another thing worried me: what will happen in the event of a raid on the
airfield, in the light of day, perfectly distinguishable from the air, with all the precious
latest technology concentrated on it!

And the pilots, as one, rushed to the experimental vehicles. Some of these machines
could not take off, because they were not prepared for that. The other part remained
on the ground because the pilots who had landed in their cockpits decided to
completely prepare for take-off, but to wait for it: it is not known how far the enemy is
from us; no matter how it happens that by the time he arrives he will have to sit
down. But several aircraft still took off.

Among them was an experienced single-seat fighter, on which young tester

Lieutenant M.A. took off. Samusev, who had recently come to our team from naval
fighter aviation.

As soon as he took off in the landing gear, the pilot felt that something was wrong
with the machine. The motor vigorously — like a dog after bathing — shook himself,
gave a sharp interruption, smoke and flame were emitted from its exhaust
pipes. What all this smells like, Misha could not immediately appreciate: the car was
“not his”, another pilot conducted its tests. However, the abnormal behavior of the
engine - even a hundred times experienced - was obvious, and the pilot decided, just
in case, to turn closer to the airfield. But the engine did not wait for the completion of
this maneuver: it issued the last deafeningly loud exhaust - and fell silent. Samusev
was left with one thing: a smooth turn with a decrease to enter the airfield. And then
it quickly became clear that he did not quite reach the border of the airfield (always
this is “a little”!). This was obvious to everyone who watched from the
ground. Obviously, of course, to the pilot. But he had no choice.

The situation was complicated by the fact that outside the airfield there was no
platform on the way approaching the airfield, which was more or less suitable for
landing even with the landing gear removed. Immediately after the wire fence began
pits, ditches, some piles of sand and gravel: they were going to build something here,
but so far they have not gathered.

Just in these piles and holes the plane was dropping. The pilot did everything in his
power to weaken the blow: he smoothly leveled the car, kept it above the ground to a
minimum speed and ...

Then all who were nearby, as if on command, rushed to meet the plane. This is also
one of the unshakable rules of conduct at the airport: you never know how an
emergency landing can turn out! A pilot can be trapped in a deformed cockpit, a fire
may break out - therefore, first aid should be ready.

On the run, we saw how a machine, raising clouds of dust, beats about uneven
ground. Suddenly, like some completely independent, it’s not known why objects
flying through the air, broken off pieces of wings, landing gear, and plumage popped
out of the sand clubs. Finally, the plane (or rather, what was left of it) jumped for the
last time, pushing off the next hill as if from a springboard, poked its nose into the
ground and, turning over onto its back, fell upside down - kapotiruyte.

- All the tail! Have taken!

And the fuselage (oh, what a heavy one it turns out to be!) Is raised, someone dives
under it, relieved to see that the cockpit lantern is open, and begins to cut the seat
belts. We have to act without delay. Gasoline flows from open tanks, everything is
soaked in pairs, and then there are still hot exhaust pipes of the engine, a battery that
is torn, tangled, shorted in many places, wiring ... More likely!

Finally, Samusev was pulled out. He is unconscious, but seems to be alive. It seems
that he doesn’t even have any special injuries, except for bruises and superficial
lacerations. However, the pilot’s face is covered in blood, his eyes are closed, and we
ourselves are not strong doctors: we can’t judge with any confidence about the
condition of the wounded.

Fortunately, this time our first impression was correct. A week later, visiting Misha in
the hospital, we found him all bandaged up, with a face thickly smeared with green
paint ("Like a clown," the patient himself gloomily told us), but clearly on the way to
recovery.
However, the most amazing thing - for which I remembered this long-standing
incident - began later.

The chief designer of the crashed plane took the news of the incident very sharply. In
fact, his reaction is easy to understand, all the more so since the notorious air raid
that started the whole catastrophe turned out to be false: no enemy planes flew to our
airdrome - at the beginning of the war there was an alarm when not needed, as well
as its absence when needed, it was not uncommon. It turned out really insulting: for
no real reason, the experimental machine was broken, the same precious
experimental machine, for the sake of which it was saved from, alas, non-existent
danger, and Samusev took it into the air.

I repeat, the emotions of the chief designer can be understood. It was also quite
natural that he, furious and having at the same time considerable administrative
capabilities, ordered:

- Remove the pilot from the test work! Kick him out immediately!

There is no word, giving such an order in haste was quite excusable. It should not
only, perhaps, then especially insist on its implementation.

By the way, the pilot, who constantly drove this car, spoke with full certainty in the
sense that, had the same thing happened with the engine in any next test flight, he
himself, the leading pilot, did not undertake to guarantee that he would be able to
safely get home. True, in the latter case, the accident would have been written off due
to the inevitable costs of the test work and, of course, would not have caused such a
loud resonance.

At first, the formidable order to remove Samusev from work didn’t especially scare
anyone: he would get angry, they say, the bosses and forget. But, alas, this calculation
turned out to be untenable. A few days later a stern request followed:

- What, Samusev has already been seconded?

The head of the flight department of the institute is the famous pilot A.B. Yumashev -
was at that time on a long business trip abroad of our country. His duties were
temporarily performed by one of the test pilots. In response to the request, he said to
the head of the institute (“temporary” it is generally easier to independently behave
with the authorities, this is their considerable advantage over the “permanent”!):

“If Samusev is seconded, I will file a report tomorrow and leave the Wreeds.” Look for
another!

Look for another head of the institute - Professor A.V. Chesalov - did not want to. And
most importantly, he himself, of course, felt how unfair to Samusev and how harmful
it would be to part with a person whose formation, as a tester, had already expended
so much effort and money.

One way or another, the professor, grimacing with displeasure, said:

- Okay. We'll see.

Watch in such cases, as you know, you can indefinitely. Each subsequent reminder
sounded not so categorical as the previous one. There were a lot of cases. And soon
the course of the war generally forced a sharp reduction in the amount of test work,
shifting its center of gravity to the rear airfields located in the east of the country.

Most of the testers - including M.A. Samusev - parted on the fronts.

But war testers are another topic.

Here, I recalled the unfortunate failure that befell our comrade - the future Honored
Test Pilot of the USSR, Colonel Samusev - only to show: sometimes the most noble
aspirations do not receive a worthy assessment if evil bad luck makes their results
converse.

***

Of course, I repeat, if you save a dying machine — and yourself along with it — by any
means, the tester must try to save himself. Still, he is not a suicide machine gunner,
chained to his machine gun!

True, aviator B.I., known in the pre-revolutionary and first post-revolutionary

years The Russian began one of his article, “The New Aircraft and its Test,” with a
dramatic phrase: “It’s not necessary to say that every pilot carries an invariable
passenger behind him - death”. But we must not forget that it was said so at the dawn
of aviation, when it really was a desperate, deadly dangerous sport, perhaps no less
than the industry of science and technology. And even then, I am sure, most pilots
would hardly have subscribed to the spectacular, but gloomy concept of the
Russian. Moreover, no one wants to consider themselves a notorious suicide bomber
in our aviation today.

The pathos of self-sacrifice for self-sacrifice among test pilots is not in use.

And we know many cases when at the very last moment, just a few seconds before the
explosion or impact on the ground, the pilot managed to jump with a
parachute. Some of our comrades — Sergei Nikolaevich Anokhin, Yuri Alexandrovich
Garnaev, and others — did not even take one, but several such forced jumps.

But, among other things, in order to be saved at the last moment, one must be able to
accurately determine when this "last moment" comes. This is also not as easy as it
may seem from the ground. Giving all one hundred percent of his will, attention, art,
all moral and physical forces to the struggle for the car, the pilot must, with some
edge of consciousness (in excess of the mentioned hundred percent) continuously
evaluate: “I have time ... I have time ... I have time ...” And decisively leave the car in a
second before this “in time” is replaced by irrevocable - “I do not have time!”. Here it
is necessary, if not calmness (the so-called iron people I met in literature, theater,
cinema, but not in real life), then a clearly expressed ability to what I would call
controlled excitement. Those who have an element of excitement in a similar
situation drowned out an element of controllability, alas, did not have time! .. So we
lost a lot of friends - noble people who did not have enough seconds of time, several
tens of meters in height, some kind of sober account of the reserves remaining at
their disposal. What did they think in the last moments of their life? That we will
never know.

However, I apologize: sometimes we can find out! We can find out what a real test
pilot thinks, though (fortunately!) Not in the last moments of his life, but, in any case,
in the moments that he considers to be the last ...

I went into the air in a fighter jet. It was in the first years of the existence of jet
aircraft, and all of its signs - from the smell of kerosene that was previously unusual
on board the plane to unprecedented flight speeds - were perceived in all severity of
novelty. Taking off and turning on the course opposite to the take-off, I again, for the
umpteenth time, was amazed at how quickly the airdrome floats under the left wing,
from which I took off less than a minute ago.

The many-kilometer concrete runway strip looked like a white drawing ruler laid on a
brown-green carpet. Now, on the edge of this line, a faint little insect glittered.

Something clicked in the headphones of my headset - this turned on the radio

transmitter of the command post - and immediately it came:

- Seventh! I am the Earth. I allow you to take off.

Everything became clear: the “insect” that I noticed was actually a new experienced
fighter jet. Anokhin is testing him. Here is listening to the air and his deaf, familiar
voice to me.

- Got it. Take off

I didn’t see his takeoff: my car didn’t stand still either. As long as the trial and the
case, the airfield and everything on it remained far behind my tail.

Minutes passed one after another. I performed the task: changed flight modes, turned
recorders on and off, recorded observations on a tablet. From time to time, the
command post asked me:

- The fourth! I am the Earth. How do you hear? Reception

I responded disciplinedly:

- Earth! I'm fourth. I am fine. I hear well.

“Got it, Fourth.” I am the Earth. Connection check…

Formally, this was called a connection check, but the reality was different: as
always. The Earth was worried about us and in such a delicate way tried to maintain
confidence in the complete well-being of three or four of its wards, worn at different
courses and at different heights in our huge test zone, which spans hundreds of
kilometers and is forbidden for all other aircraft. One or two minutes after talking
with me, the command post “checked the connection” with another machine, then
with a third one, and so on, until the line reached me again. Earth worried about
us! No matter how smoothly the matter goes, it is never completely calm for the
testers in the air.

And, as was confirmed right there, it has some reasons for this.

Suddenly a voice burst into the headphones - loud, sonorous, somehow, I will not say
- excited, but one in which the emotion restrained by the effort of will was clearly felt:

- I have flutter! Flutter! Flutter! I have flutter ...

The callsigns — neither theirs nor the addressee — were called, but I (and not I alone,
of course) recognized this voice right away. Narrated Anokhin.

Flutter! The most terrible kind of vibration of many (unfortunately, quite a lot)

known in aviation.

Anokhin fell silent ... There was a long, long pause. Finally she was interrupted by a
careful command post e-mail:

- Seventh! I am the Earth. Answer.

Again a pause ... A second request ... And finally:

- Earth! I am the Seventh. Vibration damped. But in management something is

amiss. I am pulling to you.

Anokhin's voice was again, as always, quiet and deaf. The voices disappeared from
him. But the mortal danger hanging over the pilot and the car did not disappear: it’s
good, of course, that it did not fall apart from the vibrations, but it is not known in
what condition the plane got out of the flutter. Maybe somewhere on the verge of
destruction - “on the last thread” - vital parts of the machine are held: the attachment
points of the wing or plumage, the steering rods. How will they behave under the
influence of chatter - air disturbances, always stronger below, near the ground? No
wonder, of course, Anokhin said, not “going,” but “pulling” to you!

In my head, memories slip through - far from the most charming of all possible -
about how I pulled a little over a year ago to the MiG-9 airfield with its plumage
destroyed. And a few years earlier - on an experimental SB with wings deformed from
falling into the same malicious flutter. And one more time ... In a word, there are
enough memories. There is something to compare. But now is not up to
comparisons. I want to know every second that with Anokhin.

Apparently, the Earth wants the same. She periodically, obviously more often than it
should, requests:

- Seventh! Where are you?

To which Anokhin, with his usual equanimity, briefly replies:

- I’m coming to you.

You really can’t say more. A good symptom is in itself this equanimity that returned
to our comrade.

I am lying in a deep bend over the airfield and eagerly peering into the green-motley -
forests interspersed with fields - a strip of approaches. One ten seconds stretches
after another, but everything is empty on the strip! Finally - there she is! - a sparkling
duralumin-silver fly appears. This is Anokhin’s plane. It slowly (or does it just now
seem that slowly?) Creeps along the green background of the approach strip ...
crosses the yellow sandy zone at the airfield border and ... rolls along the concrete
landing strip. All! Sat down!

At this moment, I neglect the strict rules for using radio communications and, having
pressed the button of my transmitter, I air a deep sigh of relief and the phrase not
provided for by any codes:

- Well done, Seryozha!

And then no one made any comments to me for such a clear violation of the rules of
radio communications recorded by all tape recorders.

And the vibrations that happened at Anokhin were not flutter. The technique
presented us with another surprise: another new (as if there weren’t enough
available!) Type of vibrations, very similar to flutter in character and intensity, but
still new. He was called fast buffing, and Anokhin was given the honor of being the
discoverer of a new phenomenon.

But this is already an area of clean technology. We are now interested in another - the
ethical side of things.

So, if, despite all efforts, it is impossible to save the car, the pilot must think about
himself. This we have already installed.

Well, if it turns out that you can’t save yourself? What then?

Then the real tester returns with his thoughts ... back to the car!

Not to “his whole life”, which, according to proven literary traditions, should “flash a
few seconds before the mind’s eye” of the deceased, and not to his relatives, and not
to senior officials of any rank, but to the car. To his work, to the task, to leaving his
comrades as little as possible of ambiguities and as many results as possible of his last
experiment!

That's what Anokhin wanted: to give people at least some thread, holding on to which
they could unravel the complex tangle of puzzles associated with the death of an
experienced fighter. To this, he, obeying an unmistakable spiritual impulse, and
threw seconds, which he considered the last in his life.
This is no longer a technique. This is ethics. Moreover, ethics, it seems to me, is the
highest quality.

***

With all the reverence that I had from my youth, one can say from the very first days
of my stay at TsAGI, I experienced with experienced and experimental aircraft, it
quickly became clear that they themselves did not fly. People fly on them. And, as in
any kind of human activity, a lot of moral, ethical, and other mental problems come
up, moreover, almost exclusively earthly problems than heavenly ones. To discover
this, no special observation was required: vivid, indisputable facts themselves were
striking daily.

It is interesting that at first such facts looked quite finished, neatly - like cartridges in
a store box - fit into some kind of harmonious system. And only gradually, most often
- when confronted with exceptions, in which the aforementioned system
unexpectedly lost its harmony, doubts, fluctuations, contradictions crept into the
light of day - did a problem arise.

Take, for example, the well-known position that has already been touched upon by
writers more than once: how a test pilot is "taken" or "not taken." However, no - he
always takes on any job offered to him next. It is a difficult duty for the head of the
testing or design team - before offering the next job to the pilot, weigh all the
circumstances, starting from the form in which he is now, his qualifications,
capabilities, even inclinations and ending with the very expediency of the proposed
test. And the pilot - he is always in favor. I have observed a hidden struggle for a new,
complex, interesting, sometimes dangerous task among my colleagues, without
exaggeration, an uncountable number of times. The tendency to evade such honor is
so rare that each such case was perceived as something unnatural,

In a word, tradition also exists in this respect. And, I must say, the tradition is good,
correct, clearly benefiting the cause and at the same time somehow raising the
internal image of our corporation. And of course, it was no coincidence that many
years passed before life made me think for the first time whether this traditional
mode of action of a test pilot was always unconditionally good? Does this good rule
also know its exceptions?

Alexey Ivanovich Nikashin was one of the first test pilots in our country with a higher
engineering education.

Before entering the Air Force Academy, he managed to fly in combat units for several
years. And not just flying, but even acquiring combat experience so valuable to the
tester: the Order of the Red Banner - a rarity in the pre-war years - reminded of the
participation of the then very young pilot Nikashin in repelling the troops of Zhang
Zuo-lin on the Sino-Eastern Railway in the twenty-ninth year . He flew smartly,
boldly and cleanly. Especially widely known for his flights on various modifications of
aircraft, starting with the "LaGG First", created in the design bureau
S.A. Lavochkina. It can be said without exaggeration that a considerable part of
Nikashin’s creative work continued to live in the famous La-5, and in La-7, and in the
subsequent cars of this collective. He also completed many different other tasks, and
now he was supposed to start testing a new car - the first brainchild of a young, barely
formed team. I met him a few days before the start of this work and asked the very
question that the tester necessarily asks the tester in such circumstances:

- How's the car?

“Yes, you know ...”

MORE ABOUT FLIGHT ETHICS

MORE ABOUT FLIGHT ETHICS

- I flew!

- I experienced!

- I brought the car!

Test pilots rarely use these expressions. And when they use it, they usually don’t
invest in them the same meaning as the poet, say, puts in, saying: “I composed
poetry.”

A modern plane is experiencing a large team, one might say, an entire orchestra. And
although the test pilot performs a solo part in this orchestra and sensitively listens to
his slightest remark - he is caught on the fly by the conductor (machine designer),
nevertheless, the pronoun "I" does not fit here.

No words, the position of the “soloist” leaves a certain imprint on the work of the
pilot. First of all, he bears a personal, personal, undivided responsibility for
everything that he himself decided and himself carried out in flight. Of course,
responsibility is in those - alas, not uncommon - cases when it is necessary to answer
for something deservedly or undeservedly. And vice versa: if you don’t have to answer
for anything, and the decisions and actions of the pilot are considered successful, the
whole stream of public approval or, in any case, the lion's share of it focuses - again,
deservedly or undeservedly - on the pilot.

So - let's return to this analogy - with the musician: success or failure in the
interpretation of the performed work, level of knowledge of the game’s technique,
unexpected combination carefully learned beforehand and all of a sudden, by
inspiration that arose right there in front of the audience, it’s all his own, individual,
own.

But for all that, the musician does not live and create in an airless space. He performs
not some kind of free improvisation, but strictly - up to the last note - follows written
by the composer. In his success or failure there is always something (and probably a
considerable “something”) from the work of many people, from the teachers who
taught him to the tuner who prepared the instrument for the concert, not to mention
the conductor and orchestra, if the soloist performs with them.

Nevertheless, the soloist remains a soloist!

Something similar can be said about the pilot. He also flies not as God puts his soul,
but punctually performing (especially during a test flight) the task that was compiled
on the ground — his “notes”. Each pilot has his own school, the seal of which lies with
his every movement. There are many (far more than the pianist) “tuners” who are
preparing the machine and equipment for flight. There are even special people who
ensure proper order, safety and work at the airfield and throughout the test flight
area — I almost said: creative — the situation (I don’t know who to compare them
with: administrators, stage workers, bandmates?). And in flight on a multi-seat
aircraft there is also an “orchestra”. Moreover, experienced, well-knocked together,
perfectly understand the commander test crews are not much more common and are
valued accordingly no less, than the most deserved symphonic groups. True, the pilot
- the crew commander - has to be a "soloist" and a "conductor" at the same time, but
this is already a detail.

I will not develop the analogy further by comparing the numerous automatic devices
installed on board a modern aircraft with tape recorders, gramophone, gramophone
and other musical equipment (such an analogy is dangerous: they will still be accused
of anti-mechanical moods!).

One way or another, the fact remains: the pilot, especially the test pilot, is looked at
almost the same as the soloist. Apparently, really different types of creative human
activity have something in common with each other.

But the position of a soloist, especially a recognized soloist (so to speak, a favorite of
the public), is fraught with certain temptations. For all his indestructible attachment
to my testing corporation, I must admit that not all of our young (and not just young)
colleagues were equally successful in resisting these temptations.

And the first of them is the notorious "I".

However, this "I" is a category that is found not only in the flying environment. Recall
at least common among directors: "I have fulfilled the plan for so many percent." Or
general’s: “I took the city” (on this occasion, as you know, Vasily Terkin also noted
that “the soldiers surrender the cities, the generals take them ...”).

It is not difficult to find examples in an area much closer: what is at least the
established procedure for naming aircraft types based on the first two letters of the
name of the chief designer! Here, a clear contradiction strikes directly into the eyes
between the social, collective nature of the work of creating a new machine and the
private, individual character, I will not say the appropriation, but, in any case, the
product name of this labor. It is hoped that the days of this amazing custom
(borrowed, by the way, in the pre-war years of the then Germany) are numbered. He
really does not harmonize with the spirit of the times!
That's right - "the days are numbered" - I wrote thirty years ago, in the very first
manuscript of the memoirs that you are now reading. But he turned out to be a bad
prophet. Designers, whose name continues to be called aircraft, created under the
guidance of their successors, have already passed away. And the spirit of the time that
I referred to has unrecognizably changed for the better. And airplanes - unlike ships,
cars, machine tools, in a word, all other creatures of design creativity - continue to be
called as before ...

Many, many mortals sin by replacing the word “we” with the word “I”. I repeat, other
pilots also sin. Fortunately, the whole environment of their work obviously
contributes to this: he, alone, under his own responsibility, without any prompting,
he does his job.

And only if you look at flight tests as a process (and, let me say, a creative process),
which begins long before departure and does not end soon after landing, only then its
collectivity becomes fully apparent.

The so-called joint navigation rules have long been in force in the navy. It is easy to
imagine how many collisions, failed rendezvous and all sorts of other troubles would
have happened at sea if these rules did not exist. Bitter experience testifies to the fact
that non-observance of these rules results in, let’s recall at least the death of
Nakhimov.

But old sailors understand by joint sailing not only the movement of a group of
ships. This is very well said in an interesting book by the Leningrad writer - sailor
Sergei Adamovich Kolbasyev, who died, like many other innocent people, in the same
unkind memory of the thirty-seventh year. One of Kolbasyev’s stories is called: “Rules
for joint swimming.” The character acting in this story - an experienced naval
commander Pletnev - refers to the number of rules for joint navigation and such as:
"... causticity in conversations on the ship is useless" or: "... do not rely on serving [1]
at the table in the wardroom" .

All existing flight instructions also necessarily include a special section: “Group Flight
Rules”. Its content, and most importantly, its purpose, as they say, directly echoes the
naval rules for joint navigation. But if you think about it, every flight, even when there
is one plane in the air, on board of which there is no one except the pilot, is a group
flight. Group because strong, albeit invisible, threads connect the pilot with dozens of
people preparing the flight and providing it from the ground.

And even more so, the group activity of a person who devoted himself to flight
tests. All the signs of collective creative work are evident here, including almost in the
first place - a lot of spiritual, moral, ethical problems, one after another irresistibly
popping up before the pilot, even if he thought of himself as a proudly lonely air
knight .

Our generation of aviators remembers the times when the team of testers of a new
aircraft consisted of only a few people: a leading engineer, a leading pilot, two or
three mechanics and minders, an instrumentation equipment technician - that’s
probably all. And yet it was a team. Small but collective.
The situation was different, except at the very dawn of aviation development. Then
the designer of the car was not only one “in three,” as the Lord God, but, one might
say, in many faces: he designed the plane himself, he calculated its aerodynamics and
strength, he built his own machine, and he tested it (with more or less success is
another thing) in flight.

I think that this was not the only artisanal manifestation, under the sign of which
aircraft construction developed (and, probably, not only aircraft construction) at the
beginning of its existence. There was more!

It seems to me that the designer tried to personally test his device in the air primarily
because he did not want to leave the creative process of creating a new machine at the
final, almost the most interesting stage of this process. Indeed, not a single artist,
having painted, will instruct the “alien uncle” to move away from her, look from the
side, determine the necessary amendments and, most importantly, make them on the
canvas with his brush. And the aviation designer of our days is forced to do this: too
much requires a similar profession from a person, as, incidentally, the profession of a
test pilot. It is not possible to combine them fully in one person. The only person I
knew who managed to do this, and for many years, was aircraft designer I.I. Sikorsky.

Yes, our work is collective. Collective in its very essence.

And if so, another ethical problem inevitably emerges - the problem of the
relationship of the test pilot with the test participants remaining on the ground.

Achieving full understanding here is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. And
not only one well-known proverb, according to which a pedestrian equestrian is not a
comrade, this complexity is determined; although the root cause of possible mutual
misunderstandings of the “foot” and “equestrian” most likely lies in this. Any other
explanation would, apparently, not be sufficiently materialistic.

The easiest way for a pilot to achieve full understanding with a leading
engineer. Leading engineer - flying or flightless, all the same - a natural like-minded
pilot. He, like the pilot, seeks to conduct a test program, first of all, reliably, without
failures, to get the most complete results, and to do all this in the shortest possible
time. Note in parentheses that the constructor wants the same in general. But he has
hopes for the brilliance of the results, for the timing of their receipt and for the
failure-free behavior of this process, as a rule, are somewhat different in order. And
here there is yet another case where, due to a change in the places of the terms, the
sum, in spite of arithmetic, can change. In a word, common interests are the same,
and private ... Private ones depend on the place occupied by a person among other
people. There is nothing you can do about it:

With the most exposed evidence, I observed this classic pattern among processors -
girls and boys, who, based on records on tapes of recording instruments, construct
experimental curves and determine from them those characteristics of the machine
for which the next test flight was conducted. If you ask any processor, so to speak,
theoretically, how he looks at the gradual, consistent and other principles of ensuring
flight test safety, the answer will, of course, be clearly positive. But in practice ... in
practice sometimes it happens otherwise.
- Well done Kolya! - once said one of my acquaintance handler. - He made such
dachas [2]: from the first try almost until the rudders were completely deflected. Very
easy to handle.

- To the full ?! I was horrified. “But the hinge points are not yet measured on the
machine.” Is it possible to give such deviations, while there is no reliable data on the
strain gauge rudders? After all, we still do not know the actual loads on them. That
way for a short while and wreck the ship in the air for no reason at all!

My interlocutor shrugged. Although he wasn’t as new as Kolya, a young test pilot who

first got an experienced plane in his hands, he saw in his flight materials his own:
more or less convenient transcripts for instruments.

They love the pilots, who are called "accommodating"! And in general, they do what
they love correctly: of course, the pilot obliged him to do everything in his power to
facilitate the work of his comrades. But here, as in everything in life, you need to have
a well-developed sense of proportion.

To make sure of this, it’s enough to recall at least how, before the first long-distance
flight on a Tu-4 bomber, I yielded to the insistence of my superiors, who at the last
moment demanded to include a new person who did not fly with us into our
crew. Many unnecessary complications had to be overcome not only by me (it would
be, so to speak, rightly so), but also by my companions due to the insufficient
hardness of their commander!

Yes, the wishes of the ground participants in the work must, of course, be taken into
account. But to consider it critically, with great care and repeated application of the
tested test standard "and if ...". Well, the manifestation of criticality, caution, and the
application of all kinds of measures, if it does not fully relate to the field of ethics,
then, in any case, is closely adjacent to it. You won’t get away from it.

***

It has long been noticed that often in aviation and especially near aviation circles, the
most popular are not those pilots who fly most efficiently, but those who fly especially
spectacularly.

Once this psychological shift, difficult to explain from the standpoint of common
sense, was revealed to me in a particularly explicit form.

Two heavy jet ships went on a difficult night test flight.

One by one, they slowly crawled onto the runway, taxied to the very beginning and
only there turned their noses at the take-off course: the run was ahead was solid, and
you did not have to neglect the tens of meters of concrete in front of you.

Taking off from a modern, fully equipped with all the necessary lighting equipment of
the airfield, among other things, is very beautiful.
On both sides of the strip are rows of lights - low, almost flush with the ground,
installed at strictly equal intervals of cheerful, bright lights. After one kilometer of the
strip among the lights one green suddenly appears, after two kilometers - two, after
three - three and so on. During the run, they tell the pilot how much of the strip
remained behind him and how much, therefore, lies ahead. When a loaded car takes
off to failure, this question is of more interest to the crew of the aircraft than,
perhaps, any other.

Somewhere far in the night darkness, a double chain of flickering lights merges into
one. No, this is not an optical illusion: indeed, after the concrete breaks off, a single
line of lights continues to flicker under the taking off plane - it helps to withstand
exactly the direction of take-off.

The turbines were tested in turn, the winglights flashed brightly - and the first plane
took off. From the side you can see how among the airfield lights a white ellipse is
running faster and faster - a section of the strip illuminated by the side lights. With a
roar and a roar, the plane runs past the mourners. A flame of a mysterious dull red
color beats from the exhaust nozzles of its engines - it is amazing how such a hefty
flame is completely invisible in daylight flights!

Ten to fifteen seconds pass, and the exhaust flame dissolves into the night. But the
rumble of the engines, reinforced by the repeatedly intersecting echo, is even louder:
it is now directed almost directly towards the people who remained standing at the
edge of the strip.

Airborne aircraft navigation lights - red on the left wing, green on the right and white
on the tail - moving away, flicker among the lights of the airfield. Finally, somewhere
at the very end of the strip, these moving lights slowly begin to creep up: the plane
has come off!

Everyone sighs in relief. It seemed that there was no doubt that the car would take off
- this was confirmed by the calculations and a number of previously performed take-
offs with progressively increasing weights - but still something uncomfortable moved
in the depths of my soul. Whatever you say - an unprecedented weight! In a word,
science is science, technology is technology, but thank God that this take-off is
already behind.

A white asterisk of tail light climbs upwards in the sky.

And at the beginning of the strip, the second ship is already taking off ...

They had to go many thousands of kilometers, perform complex joint maneuvers in

the night darkness, and then, dispersing, returning home via different routes. Not
every day such tasks are carried out even at our well-known test aerodrome! And
those who remained on earth, talking, reading, and doing many of their terrestrial
affairs, could not tear themselves away from our comrades, who were doing their
difficult work in the black stratosphere, in some corner of the subconscious.
I will not describe the entire course of this extraordinary departure: I did not
participate in it and I know about what follows from the words of my friends —
fortunately, my friends were part of both crews.

At first, everything went as it should. Under the cars lay sleeping earth, above them -
a bottomless, ink-black night sky. The temperature of the air overboard is such that
the mercury has gone somewhere to the very bottom of the thermometer scale: you
can live a whole life on the earth without ever dipping on such a frost! But people
almost didn’t notice all of this - more precisely, they didn’t notice it in their
consciousness, because, firstly, they got used to the situation of a long night high-
altitude flight, and secondly, they were each busy with their own business: when the
work is different, there’s no beauty nature!

So, the start of the flight went quite well. But well-being did not last long. The first
signs of possible complications appeared a few minutes after reaching a given
height. Ahead along the course in the midst of night darkness began to
lightning. Seeing them, the pilots immediately remembered the thunderstorm that
rolled over the airfield shortly before departure. Is that really her? It shouldn’t be
here: weather forecasters promised that thunderstorms would leave the planned
flight route to the side.

But - the one or the other - the storm was already very close. There was no time left
for particularly long deliberation. It was necessary to decide: whether to fly the same
course further or turn to the side?

No, the situation should not be oversimplified. The easiest way would be to name the
decision to fly ahead illiterate or clearly adventurous. But then in general there would
be nothing to talk about. And we are talking about things much more subtle than, say,
the pilot’s thoughtless desire to get into a thunderstorm in a heavy, overloaded,
unmaneuverable machine for no reason at all.

The fact is that there really was no thunderstorm right in front of the plane. Ahead,
above the horizon, stars were visible. However, it was impossible to estimate with any
certainty how much lower the flying planes would remain the top of thunderclouds:
whatever you say, night is night. And of course, prudence demanded to turn away
from this dangerous, so vaguely limited zone. Such a decision was dictated by all the
many years that were not easily reached, and therefore especially significant aviation
experience.

Suddenly, in front of and below the leading aircraft, a whole field of bright lightning
lit up immediately.

“It was like a black marble table, all covered in sparkling golden stains,” the
participants later told me about the flight that he remembered for a lifetime.

And then the second pilot of the leading ship restrainedly asked:

- She will not attract us? Maybe we’ll get around better?

He could not insist. He could not, despite the fact that he served in aviation much
longer than the commander of the ship, and had a more solid education, and he was
better able throughout his character structure to take into account some variety of
specific circumstances, taking some decision. But he was a co-pilot that day. And he
perfectly understood that any disputes with the commander of the ship, especially in
a difficult situation, sometimes pose no less dangers in themselves than even a clearly
erroneous decision of the commander.

And the commander met the remark of his colleague silently. Only after some time he
made an attempt, though not to bypass the zone of thunderstorms, but at least leave
it lower under him. The engines were brought to full throttle, and the heavy ship
strained, meter by meter, climbed up.

But it was too late. Events rushed at a continuously accelerating pace: every second
brought a new and, alas, more and more alarming. The stars in the sky have
disappeared from sight. Some strange, glowing from the inside, pink cloudy shreds
slipped through the fuselage.

Another moment - and a mighty downdraft tore the car down. Before the crew could
come to their senses, they found themselves in the thickest of a thundercloud.

And then it began!

***

A huge ship, which, one might say, the state was supposed to switch from mode to
mode slowly, smoothly, with considerable leisurelyness - this same ship, as if having
lost its supporting wings, was falling - it was falling, not falling! - deep into the black
cloud.

Air gusts threw him from side to side, bent his wings, leaned so that rivets cracked on
the fuselage.

The car was carried down hundreds of meters per second. However, it was impossible
to name the exact figure of the vertical speed: the hands of the instruments rushed
about their dials like mad, without stopping for a moment in any more or less certain
position.

Lightning flashed all around. And so, electrified to the limit, the ship itself shone with
some strange, uneven light, lights ran up on the surface of the wings and the fuselage,
sparks flew from the ends of the consoles, and a huge boiling fireball.

The clouds surrounding the machine from all sides burned with bright
flame. “Probably, the working blast furnace looks like this from the inside out,” our
comrades later said about all this alteration.

One after another, the engines turned off spontaneously - their input devices in these
flows, of course, could not work. The second pilot stubbornly launched them again,
but keeping up with the pace of events was not easy: one engine did not have time to
start, as the other failed. There was a time when three out of four engines did not
work!

We must pay tribute to the crew - he was not taken aback.

Both pilots - and the ship's commander and second pilot - did not give up: then there
would have been no chance of salvation for sure! Working as much as possible with
helms and pedals, they tried to keep the plane in some more or less acceptable
position in space, as they say - if only not up to the wheels. The navigator sitting at
the side of the airborne radar screen commanded: “To the left ... to the right ...
straight ...” - he, the only one in the carriage, could to some extent see the location of
zones of especially intense thunderstorm activity.

There was nothing more to be done ...

Fortunately, all this we later learned from the stories of the crew of the aircraft, and
not from the scattered remains collected by the emergency commission, although,
frankly, the latter should have been expected more likely throughout the course of the
matter.

When the thunderstorm finally spat out a long-suffering car from its bowels, it turned
out that within a few tens of seconds almost five kilometers of altitude had been
lost! In a normal atmosphere, an aircraft of this type could not have come down so
vigorously in any way - even in a dive.

Of course, there was no question of any further fulfillment of the task. There was
another task: to somehow get home slowly.

And it was possible - then the flight proceeded without incident, and the subsequent
thorough - until the last nut - inspection on the ground showed that the aircraft's
construction withstood the shake that fell on its share brilliantly: there were no
significant damage to the car. Dotemna burned engine hoods, in some places the
wing and fuselage sheathing was deformed, but the main power units remained
intact. However, the last circumstance should be attributed primarily to the honor of
those who designed and counted the aircraft for strength, and not those who flew on
it. The course of the tests as a result of all that happened was somehow interrupted
for a period much longer than would be required due to the party circumventing
thunderstorm clouds. It is not for nothing that it is said that our shortcomings are the
continuation of our own advantages, only in their hypertrophied form.

So it is here: the laudable desire - precisely, without deviations, to complete the task
at all costs - manifested in an excessive dose, led to clearly undesirable - well, not too
tragic - consequences!

What about the second ship? What happened to him?

Its crew, led by the commander - test pilot B.M. Stepanov - in a timely manner
assessed the possible consequences of the unpleasant neighborhood of the
thunderstorm zone and was, so to speak, preconfigured to the fact that - there's
nothing to be done - you have to turn it away!
And as soon as the potential threat of plunging into a thunderstorm turned into an
almost accomplished fact - when the "marble table" began to play with its stains and
the lights of the leading ship disappeared from view of its flashes - Stepanov
energetically turned the car aside.

The second ship didn’t get into a thunderstorm ...

It would seem that the assessment of the actions of both crews and, above all, their
commanders is clear?

There it was! A significant part of public opinion (though mostly the opinions of
people who are not flying), and after it, what is called official recognition, leaned
towards the noisy praise of the ship's commander who fell into a thunderstorm ("Well
done! He doesn’t care if the storm is there or not thunderstorm: afraid of nothing!
”). The attitude towards the pilot, who decided not to get into trouble, remained
restrained and neutral: he was not scolded, but he was not praised. And few people
came up with the idea that this pilot could not distinguish himself, brilliantly getting
out of a difficult situation, primarily because he was able to get into this difficult
situation ... not to get into it.

However, in this strange shift in public opinion, I see a tradition originating in the
darkness of centuries past - from the time of Daedalus and Icarus.

Remember this beautiful legend? Daedalus made wings for himself and his son, Ikar,
and before departure he warned Ikar not to rise too close to the sun in flight, since his
hot rays can dissolve the wax that holds the wings together. Icarus did not follow this
instruction, his wings collapsed, and he died falling to the ground.

In fact, if we ignore the noble figurative meaning of the legend and analyze its content
from the standpoint of, so to say, professional flight, I have to admit that Icarus is
none other than the first emergency officer in the history of aviation and the ancestor
of all subsequent (whose name is legion) emergency responders. Moreover, again, in
full accordance with all subsequent aviation experience, the cause of the accident
looks very trivial: failure to comply with the piloting instructions, violation of the
received task.

So it has since become a habit of aviation ...

But the popularity of Icarus in the memory of mankind is incomparably higher than
the popularity of Daedalus, who well mastered the technique of a modest pilot, who
safely and without incident reached his destination.

Alas, to this day, the modern Icarus are completely eclipsed by their sensational fame
of the modern Daedalus. Strange, but true.

What is this, also a problem of aviation (or near aviation) ethics?

Or perhaps rather aesthetics? I do not know.

***
The famous English hydrodynamic scientist Frood completed his research on ship
rocking with sincere words: “When a newly built ship goes to sea, its builder monitors
its qualities at sea with peace of mind and uncertainty, as if it was a beast brought up
and raised by him, and not he himself thought out and completed the construction,
whose qualities should be known to him in advance by virtue of the very principles
laid down in the design of the project. ”

If such a recognition is true in relation to sea-going ships that people have been
building for thousands of years, then what remains to be said about airplanes! There
are surprises, as they say, God himself ordered to be. I don’t know what about other
divine commands, but this is performed extremely well: the lack of surprises during
the flight tests is almost never felt.

And to inform the creators of the new machine is forced to none other than a test
pilot.

If the surprise is pleasant, it is of course a pleasure to say so. But for some reason
upsetting surprises come up much more often. And reporting about them is perhaps
the most unpleasant item on a long list of professional duties of a test pilot.

Sometimes I don’t feel like “cutting the truth-womb” - because of noble philanthropy
(who likes to upset others?), And because the indicated action rarely leads to an
improvement in the relationship between the pilot and the creators of the aircraft. In
a righteous desire to maintain these relations at a sufficiently high level, he will not
succumb to the temptation for a short time and follow the line of least resistance.

The plane, which first made me think about it, appeared during the war. I did not
happen to take part in his tests, and somehow it turned out that I met him in the air
only when the car was already being mass-produced.

By this time, my track record already included a good four dozen aircraft of various
types. For a long time already, there was no talk of any removal. After reviewing the
design and design data of a new car on the ground, I, like any professional tester, got
on a plane, took off, and there - in the air - he himself revealed to me all his manners
and habits.

I also flew out on this machine, all the more so because I had no reason to consider it
especially serious: a light five-passenger headquarters aircraft with two low-power
engines, a classic monoplane with a low wing - which could be unusual there!

But deviations from the ordinary began immediately after the separation.

First of all, I did not feel at the helm and pedals of the living, elastic resistance of the
air, the very resistance that makes it possible to "feel the car." It seemed that you
could put the steering wheel and pedals in any arbitrary position, drop them - and so
they will remain in that position, dragging the aircraft further and further from the
initial mode.

To top it all off, the plane was not very harmonious: not stable enough in the
longitudinal direction and excessively stable in the transverse relation.
Of course, all this did not present a danger to me and my companions: I worked as a
tester, I repeat, after all, it’s not the first year, so I managed to figure out the features
of the next plane and adapt to it soon enough.

But it was obviously not necessary to consider the car finished as such. But it was
already mass-produced! How could this happen?

As soon as the plane, calmed down by several energetic movements of the rudders,
froze in the climb mode, I turned my somewhat bewildered physiognomy to a
neighbor - the leading engineer of the design bureau.

- What are you looking at? He worried.

- What do you think: aerobatic properties are brought to her? Do you need to treat
anything? I asked diplomatically, making at the word “her” an indefinite movement
of my head towards the helm, dashboard and nose of the car.

My neighbor grunted in satisfaction:

- Everything is fine. She flew around ... - here he called the name of one of my
comrades, already at that time firmly on the list of the top five best testers of the
country. - He said after the flight that everything is fine, the car is excellent.

Apparently, the expression of surprise on my quivering forehead intensified, because

the leading engineer found it necessary to repeat:

“He said so.”

- And wrote in the flight rating?

- And wrote in the flight rating.

We flew on. The plane, requiring vigilant attention on take-off, did not become
quieter either on cruising flight modes, or on turns, or on landing. For the mass pilot,
he was undoubtedly complicated.

On earth, I asked my colleagues:

- How could it happen that such an old bison managed not to understand such an
obvious case?

And he received an unexpected answer:

- And we already asked him. He said: “I wanted to work for the company ...”

Work for the company - in other words, help the aircraft designer, without wasting
time on all sorts of research, searches, refinements, alterations, quickly stick the car
in a series. This is always pleasant, and, of course, the conclusion of the pilot, opening
the gate to such an opportunity, always contributes to the establishment of the most
rainbow relations between him, the pilot, and the designer.
Needless to say, in fact, in such a situation, the response is not against the company,
but against the company: the flight shortcomings of the aircraft sooner or later
(happiness is still, if sooner!) Will inevitably come to light in the cruel experience of
widespread use, and everything unfinished on the prototype will have to
incomparably more difficult to do on serial machines. At that, everyone will get the
hassle, and first of all the design bureau itself. True, there is still hope (the
convolutions of the human psyche are complicated!) That the designer’s irritation
over the aforementioned hassle will not pour out on the pilot who cursed his soul, but
on those future critics who “invented some flaws in a beautiful car.” If some people
tell us something pleasant and others tell us something unpleasant, you always want
to believe that the former are right.

Exploiting this human weakness is seductive. Sometimes - for example, caring for an

interesting lady and knowing the full force of the actions of the most seemingly
implausible compliments - it is excusable to give in to such a temptation. In any case,
this cannot result in significant damage to the interests of society.

But the creators of the new aircraft are not secular ladies. Talk to them without
compliments, in the open. Moreover, they can not always obtain objective
information from any other source than a test pilot.

This, as they say, imposes ...

***

If you think about it, “firming” - such a nickname has received a tendency to biasedly
exaggerated advertising of products of its design bureau - also, like many other vices,
is nothing but a hypertrophy of certain virtues, namely: a warm, patriotic attitude to
the work of your team. Another thing is that sometimes this hypertrophy is fueled by
considerations of a far from collectivistic nature.

Sometimes the commitment to your company is manifested in the forms of the

innocent, harming no one, and even to some extent pretty.

I remember, shortly after the end of the war over our airfield, a sweeping twin-engine
car appeared. Of course, we immediately recognized her: it was a new experienced
bomber of a well-known design bureau. The famous Soviet test pilot Vladimir
Konstantinovich Kokkinaki flew with it with a co-pilot - his own brother Konstantin
Konstantinovich.

But why did they fly to us? After all, tests of this machine are carried out at another
aerodrome. And no application has been received for this unexpected visit to our
control room. What's the matter?

However, there was no longer time to think about this topic: the plane was landing.

He came in somehow in an unusual way - low, from afar, on running engines, along a
very gentle trajectory. Approaching the ground, the plane did not go, as it has been
supposed for centuries, to large angles of attack, but, almost without lifting its nose,
in the same position in which it flew, touched the concrete with wheels at high speed
and ran along the strip, holding, as expressed on airfields, tail tail.

After such a landing, the car, as expected, swept very far - to the very end of the
airfield - and taxied from there to the parking lot only ten minutes later.

We were already waiting for her and immediately attacked the fun smiling pilots with
questions:

- What do you owe?

The Kokkinaki brothers joked:

- Are you not happy?

- Glad, glad. You are always welcome. And why does she sit so interesting in you?

- That's why it sits down so that you are interested. She can and so ...

Many days passed until we found out what was happening. It turned out that, taking
off in a new car, the testers found nothing more and less than ... the inability to sit
back on the ground! At the slightest attempt to remove the gas, the plane drove its
nose so vigorously that the helms completely deviated to keep it from diving. What a
landing!

They took off, but “how to get out of here”?

The matter turned out so that leaving the plane with parachutes, if it did not remain
the only way out, it acquired all the features of a very real perspective. In any case,
one should prepare for it.

And here is a new surprise: it turned out that the transparent lamp that covers the
cockpit from above and is the only way out of it does not move and does not reset
accidentally. Jammed - and that's it!

It was then that the pilots decided to go to the nearest airfield with open approaches
without high obstacles and a long, many-kilometer landing strip. And immediately
they developed an approach tactic: on average gas - the least, at which the car did not
“peck” - and landing with the tail up on the main wheels, since it was impossible to
pull it out at three points anyway.

This plan was impeccably executed - the experimental car was planted without any
damage.

But, the patriots of their company, the Kokkinaki brothers, having barely been on the
ground, decidedly did not want the ringing throughout the aircraft to come ahead of
time about the difficulties encountered in fine-tuning their new ward. So the tests will
end, all the shortcomings and malfunctions will be eliminated - then after the fact you
can tell about everything. In the meantime - no, no! That's why they began to darken,
escaping jokes from all the questions of meticulous colleagues and not even thinking
that, acting in this way, in essence, hide from people the feat they accomplished.

Of course, in this form, "firm" does not contain any harmfulness in itself.

But there are, and often are, situations in which, without exaggeration, it would be
like death.

When the first Soviet fighter jets were tested, the invasion of the region of high (at
that time, of course) transonic speeds was almost parallel to the planes created at
A.I. Mikoyan and M.I. Gurevich, A.S. Yakovleva, S.A. Lavochkina. Dangerous
phenomena awaited the first-born of our jet aircraft construction along this path:
pulling into a dive, and stalling into a roll, and various kinds of vibrations. And here it
was impossible to do without mutual communication and operational information!

Otherwise, imagine: today you were lucky enough to get out of a difficult situation
safely, and tomorrow, from the same reason, your comrade dies, not promptly
warned by you about the danger standing in his way and how to overcome it. How
will you continue to live after this?

No, competition by competition, corporate patriotism by corporate patriotism, but

here they back down to things more compelling.

And indeed, when testing our first jet aircraft, and after a few years when testing the
first arrow-shaped machines, in a word, always when we collectively overcome the
next barrier - of course, no firm spirit smelled. Mutual information from test
participants of several different, competing (or, if you like, competing) aircraft design
bureaus was quickly carried out through channels that later received the name of
“horizontal connections” - directly from one pilot or leading engineer to another.

But in a number of other cases, unfortunately, it happened differently.

And if not the company itself, then, in any case, rumors about this phenomenon are
widespread. Sometimes people began to suspect adherence to it, they did not have the
slightest attitude, as they say, neither in sleep nor in spirit, who did not have this sin.

***

There was a period in my flight biography when, by force of circumstances, I did not
have to test the aircraft themselves, but special types of their equipment - on-board
radar equipment.

Some of these trials were, in essence, extremely interesting, and only the persistent
feeling of my disgraced position prevented me from fully appreciating this.

One of the number of such tests was that I took off on a two-seater jet MiG, went into
the aerial shooting zone, closed there with a dark, opaque curtain, and, seeing only
instruments, went on the attack on a target towed on a long cable by another
aircraft. Aiming, firing live ammunition, getting out of the attack (there was no need
to collide with the target: this was the whole test, as well as all the subsequent ones
with my participation, apparently, would have ended!) - all this was carried out from
a closed cabin.

A habit quickly developed: a spinning, flickering green mark on the indicator screen
began to look convincing, reliable, not much less obvious than direct observation with
"my own eyes."

Even the need to fly blindly - to determine the spatial position of the machine by
indirect readings of instruments, and not even in a calm, straightforward flight, but
on an energetic, with deep roll maneuver - has ceased to seem particularly difficult.

After a short time, I became completely insolent and completely calm about the fact
that in the second cockpit of our fighter was not a professional pilot, but the lead
engineer Rostislav Aleksandrovich Razumov, who was not only unable to control the
aircraft, but was decisively unable to apply this skill, even if if he had it, in flight. The
fact is that my friend Razumov was (and has remained to this day) an inveterate,
incorrigible, inveterate radar. That says it all. Against the background of the radar
equipment dear to his heart, such trifles as the opportunity to roll upside down, break
into a tailspin or stick into a target simply did not exist. He did his job brilliantly - the
sophisticated experimental electronic equipment in his hands worked perfectly in the
air and steadily improved from flight to flight,

It is therefore no wonder that I felt a surge of some additional portion of confidence

when it came to inviting a customer representative on board the aircraft and the pilot
turned out to be this representative. Still, somehow calmer.

Nikolai Pavlovich Zakharov, as I quickly became convinced, owned the plane

confidently. He really was a good pilot and also a competent, erudite engineer in his
field, but - this, however, was not immediately apparent - a painfully suspicious
person. However, maybe in the latter I was wrong: it is possible that this suspicion
was not even a feature of his character, but simply the result of all that he managed to
hear enough about the notorious company.

In the first joint flight, in which I showed him the whole circus we had already
worked out, when we, having shot back, calmly flew home, shook his head and said
with approval in his voice over the intercom:

- Great you do it!

The approval from a comrade in the profession is always pleasant, and I took it,
pouting like a turkey, and expressed my full satisfaction for this occasion with a sort
of self-satisfied grunt: if you would, know, know ours!

But, alas, the revelry of my conceit did not last long. Almost the next day, one of the
members of the commission for the acceptance of our equipment asked Zakharov:

“Are you sure that Gallay is really aiming at the indicator of the device?” He doesn’t
peek in the crack because of the curtain?
This question, even leaving aside the moral aspect of the matter, was simply not very
literate: it was simply impossible to aim at the eye, so to speak, and even peep
through the crack, on a modern fighter. Here the most imperfect sight will give better
results than its complete absence.

What was the amazement of others when my partner answered this naive question
very vaguely:

- I don’t know ... I can’t vouch.

A major scandal was brewing. In order to prevent its development, the chairman of
the commission is a prominent Soviet aviation commander, a first-class pilot himself,
twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Lieutenant General (now Air Marshal) E.Ya. Savitsky
- decided to fly with me himself.

And here we are in the air. A few minutes of flight - and a trembling fluorescent cross
appears on the display screen. That is our goal. I vigorously roll the car onto it, out of
the corner of my eye glancing at the instruments of blind flight - as with speed, is the
roll too big? No, nothing, everything is within acceptable limits ... I drive the target
mark into the right position ... Now we need to not miss it: the car is cool, with
increasing overload it fits into a deep bend ... A finger on the trigger ... From a short
cannon line the plane is shaking rhythmically, as if someone is fast hits him on the
bottom with a hammer. A sharp powdery smell strikes the nose ... But, judging by the
instrument, only a few seconds of flight remain to the target. With a sharp jerk, I
throw the plane to the side - the target’s mark, flickering, disappears from the screen:
now it’s impossible to collide with the target ...

All - a combat call is made. In a smooth bend with a slide, we exit to the starting
position for the next call.

Finally the shells end. And the rest of the fuel seems to go home.

On the way, Yevgeny Yakovlevich is silent. And I don’t ask him anything: it’s not
accepted to ask the authorities, and the situation I’ve got into is rather delicate -
whatever you say, but, calling a spade a spade, I was suspected of cheating. Or, if you
want, in a company, that in general is almost the same thing.

On land, Savitsky, barely climbing out of the cab, said loudly:

- It works honestly!

And added, grinning:

- But an interesting thing in general!

Thus, everything turned out well. Moreover - not without some benefit to the
reputation of our new equipment.
In the hustle and bustle of the current work, I didn’t even have time to think about
the moral side of what happened, so to speak. Only much later it occurred to me how
generally easy to get into the position of a defendant for the sins of others!

HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR

HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FOUR

A huge jet ship, ringing idling turbines, slowly steers to the start. Now for the first
time he will go into the air.

The first flight of a new prototype aircraft is the most interesting thing that can go to
the share of a test pilot. Especially the first flight of a similar tonnage and size. If you
put it, as if in a deep bend, on its side so that the end of one wing rests on the ground,
the end of the other wing will be at the level of the roof of a twelve-thirteen-story
building.

We just shook the hands of our friends: the chief of the flight experimental station,
the test pilot engineer A.S. Rozanov, lead engineer A.I. Nikonov, Deputy Chief
Designer G.N. Nazarova and many, many more hands - dozens of people saw us
off. There would be several times more if not for the fear of "getting in the way"; only
therefore, everyone who is not directly related to the departure of a new car is
emphasized on the sidelines.

During taxiing, we try the brakes, the track control, set the flaps in the take-off
position, and monitor the readings. Everything works like a clock.

From the pilot’s cockpit, made like a swallow’s nest into the very nose of the aircraft,
as from a balcony, one can see a long kilometer runway and a snowy field of the
airfield with dozens of aircraft standing at its edges.

From the opposite side of the airfield through the frosty haze you can see the
contours of the hangars of the institute that was once dear to me, in which I worked
for fourteen, probably the best years of my life, and with which, the seventh year will
soon begin, when I broke up.

However, now is not the time for lyrical, dramatic and any other memories. We taxied
to the launch site.

Turning along the axis of the runway and putting the car on the brakes, one after the
other we drive the mighty four engines for the last time.
The readings are normal. By ear, too, everything seemed to be in order (instruments,
of course, by instruments, but hearing in aviation is needed no worse than
musical). Just in case, I turn to flight engineer K.Ya. Lopukhov, an old friend of mine,
whom fate brought with me again aboard one ship:

- Well, Kostya, what do you think?

- Full order. You can move.

- Good ... In the stern! How are you?

The calm voice of the stern observer S.A. is heard in the headphones of the
headset Sokolova:

“It's all right, commander.” The exhaust is good. Flaps in the take-off position. There

are no comments.

I switch to external radio communication and ask the command post for permission
to take off. The flight manager is not entitled, in plain text, directly to the air, to wish
us a happy first flight. He is bound by strict rules of radio exchange and can only put
maximum warmth into his familiar voice, saying dry statutory words:

- Fourth, I am Earth, I am taking off.

From the engines operating at full throttle, the entire mass of a huge aircraft trembles
finely.

- Go!

The ship lowered from the brakes starts moving and, every second increasing speed,
rushes forward. The slabs of the concrete track merge into a continuous flickering
veil.

With lateral vision, I see a small group of people standing not far from the runway,
against the place where, according to calculations, we should get off the ground.

The plane smoothly raises its nose ... Another second ... Another ... And then the
small tremor of the massive landing gear wheels running along the concrete goes out,
distinguishable even against the background of the roar and shaking of the working
engines ... It feels as if to the stormy rush of the ship forward it is mixed with a barely
perceptible, as if blowing, light upward movement…

We are in the air!

Almost unconsciously, I note that the gap occurred just on the beam of a group of
people standing aside. It's good; from the first second of the flight, confirmations of
the correctness of calculations begin to arrive. God forbid, or who is there instead of
him, so that there are more such confirmations!

But no, this does not happen in aviation. At least on the first flights of new planes.
My demanding subconscious barely had time to turn to fate with such a shameless
intercession (his lip is not a fool, this subconscious mind), as his more sober brother -
consciousness - recorded the first and, moreover, a very serious deviation from the
norm.

Taking off the ground, the car began to energetically lift its nose up - to cabry it. If
you let her do this, she will lose speed and fall. It is necessary, by all means, to push
the nose of the plane down!

What the hell! Directly haunting me is this cabriolet on the first sorties. So it was on
the jet MiG-Ninth, and so it is now. The only difference is that now in my hands is a
ship, in weight and mass - and therefore inertia - is ten times superior to the MiG-
Nine! He reacts to the actions of the pilot not instantly - directly “behind the handle” -
like a fighter, but slowly, slowly, as if having previously thought. Correcting any
deviation - especially such as loss of speed - is much more difficult on a heavy
machine.

Trying to forestall the vicious desire of the ship that had left the obedience to fight, I
push the steering wheel forward with all my might.

But the deviation of the helm is not unlimited - just a little more, and it will rest in its
focus at the dashboard: the elevator will be lowered to failure. And the plane
continues to be cabrioled. True, somewhat slower than at the first moment after
separation from the earth, but continues!

No, this disgrace must be stopped. And - without delay! It is easy to imagine how it
will inevitably end if it is not overcome in the next few seconds!

Easy to say - overcome. But how to do that? The helm has already been given all the
way. Removing the chassis will only make it worse: when released, it gives a small,
but still diving moment. Flaps? It is unknown - they can help, but, on the contrary,
can aggravate troubles; in any case, the moment is now not for experimentation.

It remains, it seems, one thing - to reduce engine thrust.

At first glance, this seems completely absurd. At each take-off — and even more so
during the first take-off of an experienced aircraft — the pilot strives above all to
speed up and move away from the ground, thereby ensuring proper stability,
controllability and freedom of maneuver. Therefore, the entire power plant must
operate at full throttle until at least several hundred meters of height have been
gained! And even more so wildly clean the gas in response to the threat ... loss of
speed!

All this, generally speaking, is correct. At all. But not now!

Now is not the time for standard solutions: there are no “legal” ways to act on a
ship. We will try illegal.

Ten years ago, when the tail unit was destroyed on the MiG-9, it was possible to
replace the action of the elevator with a variable engine thrust. Now, thank God, it is
not necessary to replace the steering wheel: it is enough if playing with traction at
least helps him a little.

The left hand gently pulls back the sectors of engine revolutions. It becomes
noticeably quieter. With my whole body, I feel the ship’s forward striking off - the
thrust is falling. The cabling from this is clearly reduced, but ... at the same time,
speed is lost. The whole question is what is more.

A few more seconds of “reflection” of a huge machine ... And her nose begins to sink
slowly! The speed stabilized ...

Seems to have won!

No, not quite yet. To defeat the cabling, I had to reduce the engine thrust much more
than I expected. Now it’s unclear - will there be enough of it for the flight without a
decrease? After all, there’s nowhere to go down! The snow-covered fields and copses
of the approach zones already flash very close - at a distance of only a few tens of
meters below us.

Two or three more specifying movements by gas sectors - and, finally, everything falls
into place: a ship, rustling with jet jets of muffled engines, steadily flies forward,
gaining, or rather scraping, every second half a meter to a meter of height. It flies at a
very modest speed, with the helm given forward almost to the stop, but it flies!

I glance at the stopwatch. It took less than two minutes to start the run ...

Again we come to the airfield, describing a sweeping loop over its surroundings and
gaining its set five hundred meters in height. The flat bottom edge of layered clouds
lies almost right above us. In some places, a spotty, black-and-white winter landscape
crosses out the sloping pillars of snowfall.

Against the white background of the fields surrounding the airfield, the cleared dark
gray concrete strips stand out as scraps of steel rails, carelessly thrown by someone
and fallen into the snow with an oblique cross.

The cabin has a calm, working atmosphere.

From time to time, something like a bee buzz is heard in the headphones. This is
engineer I.G. Tsar'kov includes recorders: on the first flight, each entry is valuable.

From the earth they ask: how are you? We answer:

- Fine.

It's true. Now everything is really normal, unless, of course, the helm is absurdly bent
forward and, as a result of this, there are very severe restrictions on our ability to
increase speed and gain altitude. But rising above is no longer necessary. Now we
have only to decline. By the way, it’s time.
And here we are on the last line. We release the flaps and set the recommended speed
for calculation.

- It seems a bit too fast. Great miss, - remarks the second pilot N.I. Goryainov.

I myself feel the same way. But, for the first time, when I land a new plane that has
never boarded, I still do not risk contrasting my intuition with the written conclusion
of a very reputable scientific organization and approach the earth carefully -
kilometer to kilometer - maintaining this given speed.

Alas, this time science has failed. We, as Kostya Lopukhov subsequently commented,
“with the songs” skipped the start of the landing strip, swept past the worried crowd
of people and landed with a solid “miss” only after I released the parachute. Try to
determine when to obey your flying instincts, and when the cold numbers of impartial
calculation! To meet the rest of the runway, you have to press the brakes with might
and main. And here, as, by the way, it was to be expected, since we need them so
much, something breaks in the hydraulic system and the brakes instantly and
completely fail. It’s good that the emergency braking system remains
operational. Only with its help we, already quite not far from the end of the strip,
finally stop the bulk of our ship.

All! The first flight is completed. And executed generally successfully.

Yes, yes, of course, successfully: in spite of all the complications that occurred during
the flight, it was established that the car takes off, lands, freely rotates in the air, that
almost all systems work properly and that - most importantly - after several minor
simple modifications, you can continue flying by program. For this, in essence, it is
only necessary that a little bit (the records of our flight will show exactly how many)
to rearrange the stabilizer to eliminate cabling and strengthen the fastening of the
hydraulic system tube.

And all our adventures? Well, maybe it's not bad that they happened on the first
flight. All the less reason to expect surprises from the car in the future.

Indeed, looking ahead, we can say that it turned out that way: a ship of this type is the
fruit of the creative work of a large team led by a prominent Soviet aircraft designer
V.M. Myasishchev, - successfully passed all the tests, for a number of years it was
built in series and earned the love and trust of all the combatant pilots who took up
his helms.

Moreover: it is still in operation - it is successfully used as an air tanker to refuel

other aircraft with fuel in flight. And one of the ships of this type fulfilled a mission of
a special kind - transported the “Buran” spaceship “from the back” from the place of
its construction to the spaceport. Longevity, you can’t say anything, rare!

In my flight book, he was listed in the column "Types of aircraft" under the number
one hundred twenty four.

***
One hundred twenty four types ...

What I just did not have to fly!

On airplanes, gliders, helicopters ...

We met - though much less often than we would like - unique experimental and
experimental apparatuses. There were also serial ones that had already been
mastered by someone before me and that fell into my hands for some additional
research.

Some of the experienced ones, such as the MiG-9 fighter jet or the heavy jet bomber,
the first flight of which was just described, rightly took a prominent place in the
history of our aviation. Others disappeared from her horizon, barely glimpsing the
only experimental specimen that did not live up to its hopes.

On some machines I flew hundreds of hours, and on some I performed a single flight
- most often for a qualitative assessment of aerobatic properties.

Among these one hundred and twenty-four types, the apparatuses were calm,
ingenuous, easy to operate. There were also tigers that could only be mastered in the
profuse "sweat of their faces."

I came across pretty awkward looking; come across and very beautiful. By the way, I
was not the only one to notice for a long time that a beautiful, caressing gaze, with its
proportions gaze, usually flies well. This seemingly almost mystical regularity, I think,
has its own completely rational explanation: the situation, apparently, is exactly the
opposite - a well-flying machine begins to seem “beautiful” to us. Aesthetic is formed
here under the influence of the rational. To see this aesthetic, one does not need an
aviator's eye. “Of all the machines created by man, the most beautiful, in my opinion,
is an airplane,” said Garry Kasparov, world chess champion, many years later. It is
interesting that this is what a man who devoted himself to chess said, in which - like
in aviation - they are also tied into one knot and art, science, and sport.

Among the types of aircraft I mastered were those that taught me a lot. There were
those after which I did not feel any visible increment of experience: I flew away - and
that’s it. However, in the interests of truth, I must say that for some reason such
devices - which did not teach anything - came across mainly at the very beginning of
my test work. After several years of service, they mysteriously disappeared - each
successive machine necessarily enriched my experience, knowledge, and formed
views with something. So, maybe it wasn’t the only cars

It was not by chance that I mentioned the formed views. Without them, in particular,
without the firm concept of “what is good and what is bad”, you cannot find the right
path in our business.

Take, for example, the problem of so-called strict aircraft like the R-1 reconnaissance
aircraft or the I-16 fighter aircraft, which at one time it was customary to say with
admiration:
- Yes! This is a car! You have to fly it skillfully: just give a leg or drag a handle - and
“hello”: fell off! What can I say, a whole generation of pilots learned to fly on it for
real ...

Indeed, about a person who has fully mastered such an aircraft, one could say with
confidence: “This is a pilot!”

But how many people who did not possess such talents (or, what is already quite
annoying, did not yet possess them) died when they fell on one of the notorious
"severities" of an exorbitantly capricious machine!

No! A plane should not demand from the person managing it the same attention and
physical training as, say, the work of a circus acrobat or a juggler. And the point here
is not only in the comparative "mass" of the flight profession compared to the circus,
but primarily in the fact that for a pilot piloting an airplane is not an end in
itself. Most of his attention should be released for the conscious implementation of
other functions, for which, in essence, a flight was undertaken.

And the test pilots involuntarily rendered the bad service of our aviation, including,
unfortunately, quite well-known ones, which brought the aerobatic properties of the
machines that fell into their hands in relation to the level of their skill, so to speak, to
their own taste, and besides in a kind of sports and entertainment flight. When,
however, a young pilot, just released from the school, did not land on a plane brought
up in such a way, and flew on it not into the training zone for performing aerobatics,
but in a very real, difficult, often unequal battle, the advantages attributed to this
aircraft, often turned into flaws.

Yes! You can’t bring a car without solid concepts,

And little contributes to the formation of these concepts as the experience of flying in
different conditions, for different tasks, and especially on aircraft of various types. So,
“gaining types” is by no means a sport or satisfaction of the collector’s passion, as
they sometimes think.

The number of types mastered is the passport of the test pilot.

It is impossible, of course, to measure the thin and diverse qualifications of the pilot
by any one, albeit very characteristic, figure. This, perhaps, would create
conveniences, even somewhat excessive, when evaluating flight personnel. But the
first, an approximate idea of the appearance of the tester, the number of types
mastered by him, of course, gives. Just as characterizes the maturity of a military
pilot, the number of sorties performed by him, and the civilian pilot - the number of
hours of linear raid.

Among the Soviet testers there are many who have mastered more than a hundred
aircraft of various types. These are V.K. Kokkinaki, N.S. Rybko G.M. Shiyanov,
S.N. Anokhin, P.M. Stefanovsky, M.A. Nyukhtikov, Yu.A. Antipov and others. I will
add that each type recorded in their flight books is undeniable. This has to be
emphasized because some of our colleagues have such a weakness - they tend to
consider every minor modification a new type, even if the inherent design differences
from the original model do not affect piloting in the least. In this way, of course, not
long to gain and two hundred and three hundred types.

True, after the first thirty or forty mastered aircraft, each subsequent one necessarily
reminds someone of the previous ones (unless, of course, this is a “pure exotic” like
some kind of turbojet), and the flight on it is done for the pilot every time everything
is simpler and easier.

But from a sudden accidental misfire, not a single pilot is ever guaranteed.

Many years ago, when we were still very young pilots, one of my friends talked about
his departure in a twin-engine long-range bomber:

- I ran away, took off the ground. Well, I think it's time to switch the screws from a
small step to a large one. He removed his left hand from the gas sectors, took hold of
the lever of the pitch of the screws and vigorously poked it from himself. And then ...
collapsed down into the cockpit! I don’t see anything. The steering wheel was
somewhere upstairs ... - Here the narrator, with both arms extended upward, showed
exactly how he held onto the “remaining somewhere upstairs” steering wheel. - What
to do? Reflexively I slipped this damn lever back and ... immediately turned up
again! I looked around with square eyes, everything seemed to be in order, and I was
probably missing for two or three seconds, so nothing could change during that
time ... What was the matter? Very simple: there were two similar levers nearby - the
pitch of the screws and the seat height adjustment. I didn’t grab the lever I needed,
and I lowered the chair to the bottom.

This amusing and humorous story told by the victim himself was repeatedly
performed in an encore and took a strong place in the repertoire in the category of
comic short stories only because it possessed (as befits the works of this genre) a
classic happy ending.

But comic accidents in aviation have to be collected. And not just for fun. From them,
too, the conclusions flow no worse than from any other.

The first conclusion from the case described is clear: one must perfectly know one's
cabin. This will say every pilot. But the test pilot will definitely add that, when
composing the cockpit, in no case should you place two similar in appearance, but
different in the purpose of the lever side by side.

Departing on a new machine, one must know its Achilles heel. Unfortunately, almost
every aircraft has it - at least at the beginning of testing. For one this is an unexpected
and violent pulling into a dive near the speed of sound, for the other - a sharp “peck”
on the nose from disproportionate helm movements with the flaps extended, for the
third - an uncontrolled energetic upward throw with subsequent loss of speed and
stall when an outraged atmosphere enters an air rush .

At first glance, it’s paradoxical, but if you think about it, it’s quite logical that such
things are especially dangerous on machines that are calm, quiet, easily and simply
controlled. Such aircraft, just because of their ingenuity, the pilot gets used to treat
with complete confidence and is taken by surprise when the plane insidiously
presents him with his own, albeit the only (no longer necessary), long-prepared
surprise.

To look for the Achilles heel of each new aircraft is almost the main concern of the
test pilot. Search and find her as soon as possible! Best of all - during the tests of the
first prototype.

By the way, this work is more likely to be mastered by a person who has experience
flying on many types of aircraft.

***

To my one hundred and twenty-fourth type, I reached the hard way.

No, this is not about jammed control levers, failed engines, unwilling to produce
chassis and other "normal" complications that are inevitable in test work. All this, of
course, was, but this, I repeat, is the norm without which you can’t live in our
business. Not air, but purely earthly misadventures most of all spoiled my life.

What could be worse than stabbing in the back! The blow inflicted by their own. By
your friends, like-minded people, teachers ...

I waited for such a blow.

One could talk about this period of his life and all the circumstances preceding and
accompanying him for a long time. And I am not doing this right now just because I
am writing notes of a test pilot, and all these “previous and accompanying” did not at
all constitute the specifics of any one particular profession.

Looking back at the years of my youth, I see that I, in general, was lucky. The period
of mass repressions of 1937-1938 passed me by. It must be assumed that the fact that
I came to our TsAGI flight test department only in the autumn of 1936 also played a
role here and just did not manage to grow into a figure that was noticeable enough to
interest Yezhov’s department. True, there was a personal case instituted against me
for “communication with the enemies of the people”, but even by the standards of
that time this communication was so obviously multi-stage (through several
“acquaintances of my acquaintances”), and the case arose when the campaign to
combat “enemies people ”if it didn’t stop, then at least it became less massive. So my
"business" soon died out.

During the war years, the public atmosphere became incomparably cleaner. The
struggle not for life but for death against a strong, very real enemy made us forget (or
almost forget) about the fictitious “internal enemies”.

However, after the war, many of the dark forces of our society revived
again. Humiliating checks and subsequent reprisals of the soldiers who returned from
captivity went. A turbid wave of struggle with the "cosmopolitans" rose. Many black
deeds were done under the flag of political vigilance. The turn came to our test team.
In short, in the spring of the fiftieth year, I was honored to open with my humble
person a rather long list of pilots seconded in the order of “clearing clogged cadres”
under various pretexts from our native institute. Rybko, and Kaprelyan, and
Yakimov, and Taroshchin, and Garnayev, and Einis, and other pilots, who worked
hard both in the past and in the future, when this murky streak of our life ended, had
to drink this bitter cup.

It remained to console myself that I at least ended up in good company.

... Long, empty, empty days were drawn, except for fruitless thoughts about the
strangeness of what was happening.

It was, among other things, very unusual. The early summer of the fiftieth year was
clear and sunny. All my conscious life, I have been at this time of year invariably very
busy. And now, every day began with the fact that I carefully, as for the service
(namely, to the service), went to the next office in the morning to make sure there was
no answer (or there was a negative answer) to one of my many statements.

After that, it remained to wander around the city, go into squares and parks, sit for
hours at some fountain. Even the cinema did not give an opportunity to be distracted:
for reasons somewhere very far overlapping with the reasons for my own
misadventures, the cinema repertoire at that time was very poor - another
outstanding (others were not released then) picture went on in all cinemas for several
months in a row.

It remained to walk and think. Walk and think, returning again and again to the same
streets and to the same thoughts.

Yes, it was cleaner than any flutter!

***

Summer has already exceeded half when I got an appointment for a new job.

A slow-moving suburban steam train (an electric train on this line appeared only a
few years later) brought me to an almost deserted platform and, panting, set off on.

The station was in the middle of the field. Neither houses, nor trees, nor even decent
roads around it were then. On the side, kilometers in one and a half or two, on the hill
there were several aircraft. And I went to them along a path trodden down in the field
(in the near future I was convinced that after even the smallest rain it turns into a
slippery clay striving to pull off a pebble from a pedestrian).

The airdrome was significantly different from the one I was used to, not only in size,
but also in the absence of concrete runways, hangars, access roads - in a word, almost
everything that seemed to me to call an airdrome an airdrome. On the outskirts of the
airfield were several standard wooden houses. A glazed booth was attached to the
roof of one of them - it was a command and control tower. A dozen aircraft lined up
in front of him — almost all of the same type: the twin-engine transport Li-2s, which
at that time were pretty outdated.
For many years, all of our civil aviation, we can say, rested on this machine. During
the war, none other than Li-2 provided all military air transportation, made
thousands of landings at partisan airfields behind enemy lines, and even - which you
can’t do from need - was used as a night bomber. In a word, these hard workers
honestly worked. But in the fiftieth year, the Li-2 was already yesterday's
aviation. Especially compared with the focus of the last word of aviation technology,
which I used to deal with: jet transonic fighters, multi-engine heavy bombers,
helicopters.

The first task I received a few days later left me even more discouraged. It was
necessary to take off on Li-2, gain four thousand meters and ... walk at this altitude,
doing nothing, while the engineers - the developers of the next electronic device
mounted in a spacious passenger cabin - will be engaged in its testing and
commissioning. So fly back and forth until they say: “Enough.” I will not argue that
such work seemed fascinating to me. But it was still better than sticking around
completely idle!

“Well,” I said to myself, “you have to try everything in life.”

A second pilot looking at my muttering asked:

- Did you say something?

“No,” I replied, if possible, in a peppy voice. - Nothing. Let's go further ...

***

And I began my life “in disgrace”. However, upon closer examination, the devil was
less frightening than my imagination, traumatized by all previous events, didn’t.

At the new job, there were a lot of things that I still remember with a warm feeling. To
begin with, new colleagues, with rare exceptions, treated me with cordial goodwill.

The flight director of my new company, the famous pilot Valentina Stepanovna
Grizodubova, set the tone in this direction.

In the pre-war years, they talked and wrote a lot about her record flights, and during
the war the long-range bombing regiment of Grizodubova won notoriety, not only
successfully raiding the enemy’s military facilities, but also maintaining (on the same
Li-2) communications with the partisan detachments in deep behind enemy lines.

Pilots of all kinds of aviation spoke a lot and warmly about Valentina
Stepanovna. The story of how Grizodubova rescued five people from an emergency
vehicle was widely known. Here is how it was. One night, having returned first from a
combat mission (her crew at that time “illuminated” the target and therefore finished
the work before everyone else), Valentina Stepanovna remained at the start. One by
one the ships of her regiment came and landed. After the last of them sat down,
Grizodubova was about to go to headquarters. But at that very moment misfortune
happened: at the landing, a plane of a neighboring regiment, based at the same
airfield, was broken down. Having demolished the chassis, the car heavily, with all its
weight collapsed the fuselage to the ground, crawled, carving a fan of bright sparks
from the ground, several tens of meters ahead - and it caught fire!

Without losing a second, Grizodubova rushed to the burning plane. Someone shouted

after her:

- Where are you going? Late! All the same, they will burn there!

Looking back on the run, Valentina Stepanovna managed to find out the author of
this reasonable advice. It turned out to be none other than ... the commander of that
same regiment, which owned a car in distress! However, neither for surprise, nor for
indignation, nor for any other emotions there was no time. From second to second,
gas tanks and a large-caliber ammunition of airborne machine guns were supposed to
explode.

Grizodubova, together with pilot V. Orlov who joined her and two motor sergeants,
broke into the emergency hatches, resolutely climbed into the car burning in a hot
flame, helped the crew, cluttered in a distorted cabin, and then dragged stunned
people - as they say, “by voice, and whom and dragged ”- to a safe distance.

And then the plane exploded!

As soon as the smoke cleared a bit and the clods of soil and fragments of the car
raised by the explosion fell on the ground, Grizodubova looked around and quickly
discovered a group of people standing at a respectful distance from the scene of the
incident at dawn. Judging by the shoulder straps, these were officers. But
Grizodubova did not find it possible to attribute them to the number of carriers of
military ranks. She leisurely (now it was already possible to do everything leisurely)
looked around the company, which showed weak signs of embarrassment, and
casually threw:

- Oh you guys! You should wear skirts ...

Grizodubova was not afraid of difficult situations in the air, was not afraid of
dangerous sorties over hundreds of kilometers deep into the territory occupied by the
enemy, was not afraid of any of the various difficulties of life in the war, was not
afraid - and is not afraid to this day - and ... the anger of the authorities (kind of
courage found in life almost less often than all previous ones taken together). At the
same time, Valentina Stepanovna brings her point of view to the attention of
interlocutors of any rank, invariably taking care first of all of persuasiveness and only
after that of secular formulations.

Once - it was almost three years after I came to a new place of work - several leading
comrades joined forces persistently convinced Grizodubova to get rid of some
employees of the flight test base, although, according to Valentina Stepanovna
herself, the people we were talking about were completely in place. After a lengthy
debate that led to nothing, one of the persuaders could not stand it and exclaimed in
exasperation:
- Valentina Stepanovna! You are a smart Russian woman. Well, tell yourself: what
can so firmly connect you with some ... - and he named the name of one of the
"controversial" characters - an engineer at our base.

“Very simple,” answered Grizodubova. - We fought together for four years. However,

you do not understand this. You weren’t around at that time ...

So she did not offend any of the people planned to be fired. If you think about it, this
case is not so different from when she pulled the crew out of a burning car.

In contrast to many generally kind people, Grizodubova not only wanted to, but she
was able, as she can today, quickly, in a businesslike way, not in word, but in deed, to
help everyone who just turns to her. And they turn quite often: the spiritual qualities
of Valentina Stepanovna are known in aviation, I am very widely around her. They
are used. Frankly, they are sometimes abused.

Communicating with people like Hero of the Soviet Union and Hero of Socialist
Labor Grisodubov is a reliable means to restore the shaken faith in humanity ...

The good attitude of my colleagues turned out to be the first, but not the only gift of
fate that I got in a new place. Having flown a bit on Li-2, I got the opportunity to take
my soul to the helm of a more modern and solid aircraft - one of the four-engine
bombers we had on the LIB (flight test base). True, this was far from a new machine,
and the flights that I had to carry out on it hardly deserved the name in the full sense
of the word test. But it was still flying.

And a few months later, fortune smiled at me completely, as they say, to my ears: our
company began to create radar sights for fighter aircraft. I was the only LIB pilot
flying on jet technology at that moment. And therefore this test was entrusted to me.

So my main role was determined for the next several years, during which I flew
mainly on experimental fighter jets created in the design bureaus, which were led by
A.I. Mikoyan and M.I. Gurevich, S.A. Lavochkin, A.S. Yakovlev. True, these machines
came to us already tested. The development of our special equipment and the
development of the methodology for its use remained on my lot. But it was
interesting, and most importantly, no one could stop me from looking in the
airplanes themselves for something that had not been noticed before by their
colleagues flying before them. I must admit that such searches turned out to be
successful quite rarely - it was not children who tested the experimental jet
fighters. But when it was still possible to catch something new, I received complete
sports satisfaction. Yes, and not just sports - in this way I tried to avoid
disqualification, so as not to lag behind my business by the time when it would be
possible to return to the real test work. And that such a moment would come, I did
not lose hope throughout the years of my “disgrace”.

***

It was good to fly on “real”, serious planes again!

But alas! - there is no rose without thorns.

In flights on new aircraft, God inevitably comes up with all sorts of small, medium,
and sometimes large defects. It is natural: it is impossible to foresee everything on
paper, and every inaccurate decision of designers and technologists sooner or later
turns into another defect in flight operation. Sooner or later. This is far from
indifferent: sooner or later! Of course, I would like to identify all the flaws of the new
machine without exception during the tests of the first prototype. But that almost
never succeeds.

Most yes. But not all!

Much more will come out during trials of an understudy, if one is done. Much is in
the small series. And something - this is the worst - and in the subsequent normal
operation.

He continues, although, of course, less and less, to present his surprises (here they
are, thorns) and the first prototype, unless, of course, put him on a joke, but continue
to fly on it.

I once had the full opportunity to verify the latter in practice, testing our equipment
on an experimental two-seater jet fighter-interceptor manufactured by
S.A. Lavochkina.

Having completed the task, we, with the lead designer Rostislav Aleksandrovich
Razumov, who performed the duties of an onboard experimenter in these flights,
returned to the airfield. Having described a wide arc - at a low altitude it is especially
noticeable with what large radius a high-speed jet engine is turning - we go to the last
straight line.

The landing strip is right in front of us, the height is two hundred meters, I reach out
and press the release flaps release button. Now they will crawl out from under the
trailing edge of the wing, the car will slow down and “swell” up a bit. So at least all
planes are supposed to react to flap release.

Unfortunately, this time things turned out differently.

As soon as I pressed the button, the plane fell sharply into the left roll. He fell at such
a brisk pace as happens when performing aerobatics - a coup through a wing or
barrels. But we didn’t need to make any figures - the earth is nearby! An attempt to
keep from turning over in the usual way - ailerons - did not give the slightest
result. Another one or two seconds - and the car rolls upside down, and then it is
more or less indifferent in what position we crash into the ground.

And here the iron rule of thumb helped, which test pilots invariably follow in acute
time pressure: if after some action by the pilot something abnormal appears in the
airplane’s behavior, and there is no time to understand the essence of the phenomena
that have arisen, you must immediately “replay” this action back .

Strictly speaking, formal logic has a different opinion on this subject. Even the
ancient Romans understood that it was by no means necessary: "After this, it means
as a result of this." But in practice, the chronological connection of phenomena rarely
exists outside the causal connection. In addition, I repeat, this rule is only used when
there is no time for more rigorous logical constructions.

Therefore, without spending more time on futile attempts to keep the plane in
obedience to the ailerons, I without too much thought poked the flap-cleaning button.

The effect followed almost instantly: the rotation slowed down, the car fixed with a
roll of more than ninety degrees - on the side, so to speak, with the wheels moving
upwards - and slipped on the wing to the ground. This was also not good enough:
with lateral vision, I saw that the earth is already much closer than I would like. But
at least the plane obeyed control again (and I shook it, as you might guess, with all my
might).

When the car finally leveled, barely a few tens of meters remained to the ground. The
first conscious thought that occurred to me was: “It’s good that I started flap release
at two hundred meters, and not at one hundred and fifty! ..”

Landing had to be done with the flaps removed. At the same time, difficulties arise,
but this is a trifle compared to the just-finished “off-camera” plane.

Just before the landing, Razumov's unflappable voice suddenly sounded in my

headphones:

- Mark Lazarevich, why did you give such a roll now?

You gave! I answered this not-so-timely question asked only with a look that seemed
so fierce that my companion immediately removed the problem from further
discussion:

- I understand, I understand! Then.

However, at that moment I could already answer - who, and most importantly, why
“gave such a roll”: it was obvious that the right flap came out and the left did
not. Inspection on the ground confirmed this: for some unknown reason, the flap
thrust burst in flight.

The ill-fated thrust was replaced by a new one, and we went flying on the next
mission. But as you know: the first time - ignorance, the second time - already
thoughtlessness! Firmly mindful of this test commandment, I now, approaching the
landing, took aim at a straight line from afar and fired flaps at an altitude of more
than three hundred meters ("the reserve pocket does not burden ..."). And most
importantly, putting one finger on the flap release button, another finger of the same
hand attached to the button next to their cleaning.

And all these tricks of mine were not in vain. The story repeated: again, the right flap
went to release, and the left, grunting dryly (the same damned draft), remained in
place. The car again fell sharply into the left roll. Bad again!
But no: the old fish doubles on the same hook twice! Almost simultaneously with the
jerk of the plane to the side, I pressed the flap-cleaning button, and the roll stopped,
barely having time to start. The next "circus" was stopped, so to speak, in the bud.

The same story repeated for the third time.

And only after we broke three thrusts in three flights, and I adapted to land the car
with flaps retracted as if it hadn’t been expected otherwise, the plane was subjected to
major treatment. Our lead engineer turned out to be right, in the past he was a test
pilot himself, who flew a lot on new fighters, M.L. Baranovsky. He believed that
during a take-off run on wet ground - it was a thaw - water got under the flaps. In
flight, it froze, and the resulting ice tightly grabbed the ill-fated craving. And so it
turned out.

Previously, on this machine in such weather - water on the ground and frost above -
did not fly, but because of this the defect (imperfection of moisture drainage from the
wing cavity above the flaps) for the time being did not manifest itself.

Simply? Of course, simple! Everything is simple after the correct answer is known.

In this case, I deviated a little from the accepted rule — whenever possible, avoid
intrusions into “clean technology” in my notes — to show with a concrete example
what little things can sometimes lead to a difficult situation in the air and how much
knowledge, experience, common sense are needed to correctly understand these little
things.

I'm afraid to say that such numbers alone brought me (like any other pilot) a special
pleasure. But, having ended safely, they invariably left behind a very strong - and
equally pleasant - feeling of some kind of inner satisfaction. Using for many years my
own person as an experimental animal for psycho-physiological observations, I found
an interesting pattern: having gotten out of the next difficult situation thanks to my
own experience, well-developed reaction, skills, knowledge, you always experience a
surge of optimism, self-confidence, active desire immediately fly in the obstinate car
again. But the most successful outcome of a dangerous situation, in which you find
yourself obliged to an event, blind luck, happy coincidence of circumstances
independent of the pilot, it somehow does not work very nicely: today, they say,
lucky, but tomorrow it may not be lucky! In the natural human desire for his own
well-being, one wants to rely not on chance, but on regularity ...

No, I did not seem to lose qualifications during my “disgrace”. Moreover, even

managed to learn something.

Gradually, I began to understand a little in aviation electronics and the tactics of its
application. In any case, my new friends, especially G.M. Kunyavsky and R.A. Reason,
put a lot of effort into this.

But not only electronics taught me a new job. It was here that I was the first to
properly train in instrument flight - blindly. True, even before that I was in a happy
belief that I had a blind flight, because I could calmly break through after taking off
through the clouds up to the sky, and after completing the task, return again down to
the earth. And here, shortly after coming to the LIB, I had to somehow pass in
continuous cloudiness for nearly seven hours in a row. Yes, even with a fair amount of
icing. And it’s not easy to pass — if only, so to speak, not to fall — but to follow
precisely defined courses, above strictly defined points on the invisible earth's
surface.

We are with the second pilot P.V. Ryazankin turned the helm in turn: half an hour,
one, half an hour another (well, when a strong, reliable co-pilot sits nearby). On and
during the next rest, the eyes themselves continued to habitually rummage around
the instruments.

So we spent the whole day — from breakfast to dinner — without seeing anything
except a swirling gray haze behind the glass of the cockpit and dashboard with arrows
trembling at the same dial divisions.

In the future, I often had to fly blindly for many hours in a row, and this no longer
caused any special sensations, and I did not remember all such flights. Only one
remained in my memory - the first - of them. Again, it means we managed to learn
something.

***

Nevertheless, I wanted to circle the day I returned to the real test work on the
calendar in red pencil. Grizodubova - thanks to her and for that! - not only did not
interfere with the implementation of my intentions, but after a little thought she said:

“Sorry to let you go.” But pickle here, too, of course, is impossible. - And then I took
up the telephone receiver, immediately joining in actively contributing to my plans.

Times have clearly changed. So many opportunities were revealed to me at once

(where they were three years ago ?!) that I could only choose.

RECORDS AND RECORDS

RECORDS AND RECORDS

Aviation records ...

From time to time, a laconic message appears in the newspapers: such and such a
pilot (or a crew in such and such a composition) set a record. This is followed by the
date of flight, the name of the type of aircraft and, of course, the numbers
characterizing the achievement itself: speed, altitude, distance, and the
like. Sometimes next to the text is a photograph of newly made champions. Less often
- an enthusiastic (though far from always impeccably accurate in essence) note by
“his own correspondent from the N-th airdrome”.
A non-aviation reader runs through all this, stating something like “Good fellows!”
On the periphery of consciousness and switches his attention to other, more
interesting messages for him.

And indeed: are aviation records worth talking specifically about them? Especially
next to the main problems of flight test work.

Nevertheless, it’s worth talking about them. It is worth at least for the fact that no
other side of the activities of a pilot working on modern aircraft (that is, primarily a
test pilot) is brought to the public in such a broadcast and operational
manner. Hence, probably, a widespread misunderstanding, which I happened to
observe more than once: the naive belief that setting records is, if not the only, then,
in any case, the main content of the work of a test pilot and the main form of social
return to this work.

It is annoying to hear how a pilot who tested many types of new aircraft, dragged
more than one of them to serial production, repeatedly came out of the most
seemingly hopeless situations - in a word, he lived a difficult and glorious life of a
tester, they say:

- BUT! I know ... This is the one that flew across the pole to America or set some
record, either altitude, speed, or something ... In general, something like that ...

No, of course, an aviation record is far from the most important thing in the activities
of people who design, build, and test aircraft. Rather, you can call it a kind of by-
product of this activity. But even in that capacity, he is far from uninteresting.

So what is an aviation record? This question, it turns out, is far from idle already
because of the fact that the very concept - an aviation record - does not seem equally
indisputable to everyone.

When a runner tears the finish ribbon, or touches the swimmer’s wet tiles with his
hand, or lifts a weightlifter bending from his own weight over his head, no one
doubts. In fact, he ran, he swam, he picked up himself - what doubts can there be?

True, the history of sports knows exceptions to this rule. When at one time our
athlete Yuri Stepanov surpassed the American jumper Charles Dumas, some foreign
observers expressed doubt about the reliability of such a sensational event. There was
even a hypothesis, according to which the secret of Stepanov’s success was in his ...
shoes: as if they had some kind of cunning, especially elastic sole that throws the
jumper up, like from a springboard. There are amusing circumstances in which this,
frankly, not very athletic hypothesis was visually refuted: at the next competition -
this time in a full-time duel - Stepanov again won against Dumas, after which he
immediately presented him with his magic shoes at the stadium. However, as
expected, Dumas did not jump at them higher. It was not about shoes.

But this episode is nothing more than a curious exception. Usually, in such sports, the
athlete’s personal “authorship” is recognized unconditionally.
The situation is somewhat more complicated for horsemen. Opinions about who is
“more important” here - a rider or a horse - often differ. At one time, one of my
superiors asked how I feel about equestrian sports. But I, in fact, had nothing to do
with him: it was in the early years of my work in aviation, and there was no place left
for any other means of transportation in my heart. Therefore, without further
thought, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind:

- Horseback Riding? Is this a sport for the rider? I thought - only for the horse.

Subsequently, I realized that I should not have expressed this thought even as a joke:
the chief was fond of riding seriously. But this is not about that now.

Unfortunately, what is said about the rider and the horse as a joke, often acquires a
very serious character, as soon as the conversation concerns a record set in the sky:

- And what did the pilot actually do there? He took off, gave full throttle, the plane
and dispersed, as far as it should be. Another pilot would be sitting at the helm, all
the same, the result would be the same ... What kind of sport is this?

And yet - I affirm this with a clear conscience - an aviation record is almost always an
achievement not only technical, but also sporting in the full sense of the word.

By the way, I’ll notice that my opinion in this case is absolutely impartial: I myself
have never been a champion — neither world, nor all-Union, nor at least regional or
district. So to speak, laurels were not awarded.

However, almost all the pilots of our generation, who had formed by the beginning of
the war, and by the sixties began to gradually give way in the cockpit of their aircraft
to their younger colleagues, were in a similar situation.

Of course, during this time - a period of rapid quantitative and qualitative growth of
our aviation - in fact, many achievements were established, including those that
exceeded the world ones. But for a number of reasons - sometimes with obvious
consequences from state interests, and sometimes not very clear - these records
remained, as a rule, not made public. And in any case - officially unregistered, in
accordance with the rules of the International Aviation Federation - FAI.

Such a fate befell the practically record value of the Mach number, which I had
achieved at one time on the first domestic MiG-9 fighter jet; many other significant
results obtained by more than a dozen of Soviet test pilots on domestic aircraft
remained also little known.

I think that the history of our aviation will still return to the study of these half-
forgotten, many times since blocked records - steps, without each of which there
would not be a whole staircase leading to the modern level of aviation technology.

In these "steps" - the whole thing. General Designer M.P. Simonov accurately said

about them: “There is a competition of ideas, the level of technology,
aerodynamics. How to check in peacetime - is this level sufficient? Therefore, records
are set at the limit modes. "
But I was somewhat distracted to the side.

But what is the situation with the purely sports side of the aviation record? Is it sport
in the end or not sport?

Let's try to figure out some example.

***

The highest altitude that a modern high-speed aircraft is capable of gaining,

independently (this is also an essential detail), starting from the ground, is about
thirty-five kilometers.

True, this is more than ten times less than the flight altitude of spacecraft, but four
times higher than the highest mountain in the world - Chomolungma (Everest) and
one hundred and seventy times higher than the building of Moscow University. So
compare with nothing - a solid height!

But one should not think that an airplane is capable of flying at such an altitude
calmly in a straight line, as in some sort of flight flight. Unfortunately, it can only be a
dozen kilometers lower.

And to the record height of the “dynamic” ceiling (called so in contrast to the usual,
static) the car jumps out with a steep slide - like a stone thrown up by a sling. It pops
up, and then in a matter of seconds, as soon as the inertia of the upward movement is
exhausted, uncontrollably - again, like a thrown stone - it falls backwards,
downwards, into denser layers of the atmosphere, where there is something to lean
on wings.

It would seem that everything is very simple. So to speak, pure mechanics.

And indeed, without accurate engineering calculations, the maximum dynamic

ceiling cannot be reached. Calculations, preliminary experiments, analysis of the
estimates made in advance - all this gives a lot. A lot - but not all! Something (and a
very solid “something”!) Remains with the pilot, his talent, intuition, his sixth,
seventh — I don’t know what kind of feelings it is.

Here the pilot gained a given height, at which he must accelerate to throw up. This
initial height is determined in advance - as long as everything goes “from
calculation”. The machine is brought to the horizontal, the boost is turned on, the
back of the seat significantly presses the pilot on the blades - the speed is growing so
energetically! .. Instrument readings? Normal! .. Acceleration continues. Now the
doubled speed of sound is left behind.

It's time!

The handle is on itself - and a terrible burden falls on each cell of the pilot's body. She
- this cell, - obeying the eternal law of inertia, longs to fly forward evenly and
rectilinearly, and the wings of the uplifting aircraft drag him (and everything that is in
it - living and non-living) up.
But the trick is not just passively overloading. It is necessary to fine-tune the control
knob so precisely to meter it so that the car speeding at a tremendous speed will move
from horizontal flight to a steep, almost vertical lift in the best way, as they say, in an
optimal way. A little smoother or, conversely, a little more energetic than necessary,
and some part of the manpower of dispersal will be lost unproductive. And such a loss
- hundreds and thousands of unfinished meters of dynamic ceiling.

But here a sweeping arc is described in the sky, and the plane rushes, as if standing
on its tail, nose up. Overload abruptly decreases. Before the pilot is the black sky of
the stratosphere. He sees the Earth - or rather, the hazy gray haze behind which the
Earth is hiding - only with the corner of his eye, with side vision. However, the Earth
is clearly visible or poorly, the slightest inclination cannot be allowed. This will also
result in an unfinished height.

Anyway, even though the overload released the body of the pilot, it’s too early to
rest. After a few seconds of straight candlelight flight, it’s time to lower your nose
again a little bit - to reduce the steepness of the set, so that the speed does not fall so
quickly (and how exactly - let intuition tell). The pilot just weighed several times his
usual weight; now - at the inflection point of the flight path - it weighs less and
less. Weightlessness lasts more than a minute. Yes Yes! The same "cosmic"
weightlessness! It turns out that it can be felt not only in space, but also in the
atmosphere. However, the space in which the plane is rushing, already reaching the
last kilometers of altitude, really looks more like space than the usual near-Earth
atmosphere: it is not without reason that almost ninety-nine percent of the entire
mass of air surrounding our planet remains below.

But the pilot is not up to observing the sky. Now we must, carefully adjusting the
angle of set, choose the speed to the end - bring it to the minimum beyond which the
plane will lose control and, before reaching the ceiling, will fall into an uncontrollable
fall.

But now, it seems, everything! Frozen for a second at the very top of the trajectory -
indeed, like a stone thrown up - the car rushes down uncontrollably. She cannot
linger here, just as a jumper cannot freeze above the bar.

Down, down, down! Now there are other concerns, starting with the fact that the fuel
remains at the very bottom of the fuel tanks. It is necessary to build a reduction so as
to directly get to the airfield. The times when aircraft, if necessary, could land outside
the aerodrome, alas, have long passed: the wrong landing speeds, the wrong mileage -
in general, the wrong cars! However, “those” cars could not rise to such a
height. Nothing in the world is free.

It is good though that all the difficulties of returning to earth at least do not affect the
result already achieved.

And the very achievement of the result - now, I hope this is clear - requires those
qualities that stick the record holder in any sport: will, intuition, training and much
more, which I already spoke about.
The first Soviet pilot to write his name in the table of official world records for the
dynamic ceiling was V.S. Ilyushin. In the summer of 1959, on a T-431 aircraft, he
reached a height of 28852 meters, blocking the achievement of the American Nilot G.
Johnson by more than 1000 meters. After some time, American Joe Jordan returned
the record to his country, gaining more than 31 kilometers. But in the spring of 1961,
a memorable space spring! - test pilot G.K. Mosolov on the plane E-66 breaks out
34714 meters from the Earth!

It has long been known: records are born in competition. Moreover, world records -
in the competition of world-class masters!

***

“Well, well,” they can object to me, “let the record of the dynamic ceiling really be an
achievement not only technical, but also sporting.” And all sorts of other records - on
heavy aircraft, for example? What special maneuver can there be? What
intuition? Why is there a surge of energy, will, all qualities without which the record
holder is not the record holder?

Good. Let us recall the circumstances of the establishment of a record on the heavy

machine itself.

In October of the same 1959, in which V.S. distinguished himself Ilyushin, crew of

test pilot A.S. Sticky on a 103-M heavy ship set seven world records in one flight at
once! By the way, two of them have not been beaten for many years: a fact in the
history of rapidly developing aviation is extremely rare.

How can I set seven records in one flight?

Very simple: the FAI grid provides for separate recording of the highest world
achievements for aircraft without a load and with a control load of various weights -
five hundred kilograms, a ton, two, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five tons on
board. Naturally, to get a higher speed or altitude to a heavier-loaded aircraft is more
difficult, and, in fact, the practical value of such an achievement is somehow more
humanly obvious: an aircraft, like any transport vehicle, must first transport
something. So, the 103-M aircraft had on board more than twenty-five tones of the
control load — carefully weighed and recounted by casting iron pigs by the sports
commissars — and the speed showed greater than all aircraft flying at such a distance
with a load of not only twenty-five, but also twenty fifteen ten, five, three and two
tons! Here you have seven records at once.

It is easy to argue that such a brilliant combination of carrying capacity and high-
speed qualities of a car cannot be attributed to the talents of its crew.

Let us come back to the question of which qualities of the aircraft depend on the crew
and which do not depend, a little later.

In the meantime, let's see how the record flight itself proceeded.
Much of the elementary scheme of action given above - “took off, gave full throttle,
and then the aircraft itself ...” - required certain corrections here.

First of all, about "gave full throttle." Once the maximum flight speed of a propeller-
driven aircraft was really determined by the power of its power plant. Another thing
now: many types of modern jet aircraft use the notorious full throttle only during
takeoff and partially during climb. In horizontal flight, the thrust of the engines must
be deliberately limited: otherwise the aircraft will develop an unacceptable
speed. Unacceptable sometimes for its strength, and more often for stability and
controllability. During flight tests, the aircraft must be brought to speeds at which
these dangerous phenomena are already beginning to manifest themselves, but for
normal operation, the maximum permissible speeds are limited, of course, with a
certain margin, values significantly lower than those achieved during the tests.

But, staying within these legal restrictions, you will not get a record result. Suddenly,
they find the most direct meaning, far from any allegory, of the meaning of Marshak’s
line:

... none of us would take off,

Leaving the earth in the skies

If I didn’t want to refuse

From stocks of excess equilibrium.

And Lipko drove a huge car over the entire thousand-kilometer distance at a speed
really - without the slightest margin - the limit.

Steering wheels in the hands of pilots, dashboards, openwork glazing of the

navigator’s cabin, sweeping wings of wings, tail feathers - in a word, the whole ship
was trembling and twitching, as if in a fever, under the influence of many randomly
breaking whirlwinds: the air flow categorically refused to flow around the car
smoothly.

Significantly decreased stability. Any very insignificant deviation from a straight

flight path, arising under the influence of a random wind blow, could not be restored,
as it should be on a respectable, decent aircraft, independently, but, on the contrary,
strove to grow, flare up, pick up an airplane and drag it into dangerous overload
sharp cabrio or dive deeper with every second.

What are there "extra reserves of equilibrium"!

However, the tendency to throw up and down every second has been countered not
only in order to prevent them from taking dangerous sizes, but also in the interests of
the most accurate maintenance of the given flight altitude. It is not in vain that the
leading engineer — now sitting in the cockpit behind the commander’s back —
worked so hard on the ground to find this only height, on which the road to the
record lay. And the plane literally burst from the hands of the pilots. As the saying
goes, an eye and an eye were needed behind him to keep in obedience.
The pilots, with a firm hand holding trembling helms, balanced them with the
accuracy and clarity of good jugglers. In tests, such an acute mode has only to be
tried: to get into it, to record it for some tens of seconds by recorders, to feel the
airplane’s behavior qualitatively, and that’s all! You can clean up the gas and return to
the area of normal human speeds, at which the plane behaves decently and
peacefully. And here, in a record flight, the balancing time on the knife edge was
measured not in tens of seconds, but in tens of minutes, almost an entire hour!

And yet, the most difficult moment for which the pilots were preparing ahead of time
was, of course, a U-turn.

When he reached the turning point of the route — the city of Orsha — the plane had
to turn one hundred eighty degrees in order to go the second half of the way back to
Moscow. It was necessary to turn around as quickly as possible: each second of delay
delayed a noticeable share of the average flight speed with such difficulty. But
superheavy planes are not adapted to dashing, as on a fighter, in turns. Their thin,
flexible wings simply cannot withstand such an overload. Sticky, long before the day
of the record flight, he began to train in the implementation of turns of extreme
steepness. He threw the car into a roll, at least twice that officially authorized in
normal operation. It seemed that even at least one degree - and the ship could not
stand it. But the pilot did not allow this last degree! He kept on the very limit above
which - an accident,

To top it all, it was not necessary to turn around in a horizontal plane - at a constant
height - but describing in the air a certain complex curve along the vertical. The first
half of the turn had to be carried out with a steep ascent in order to extinguish the
speed as quickly as possible. The fact is that excess speed — the very speed for which
the crew so fought in a straight line — during a U-turn turns from a blessing into a
considerable evil: the higher the speed, the greater the radius, and hence the duration
of the U-turn; make sure this is easy without getting up in the air, by car or even by
bicycle. Of course, it would be possible to extinguish speed without a slide, in
horizontal flight, in the simplest way - by removing the gas, but then, having finished
the turn, you would have to accelerate the car again in a straight line, and a heavy
ship does it very slowly,

To speed up the restoration of the previous speed, it is best to accelerate after a turn
at a steep decline with full throttle. So it was conceived: to do the second half of the
reversal with a decrease.

It turned out to be a complex, some kind of curved aerobatic trajectory: first, a

combat U-turn with a limit (or more precisely, an outrageous!) Roll and energetic
climb, and then a steep decline with the same roll and acceleration of the original
one, which also goes beyond all the usual speed limits.

Everything is the ultimate, greatest, maximum, which does not fit into the usual
norms!

Aerobatics on an extra-heavy ship! It would seem difficult to come up with something

more complex.
But truly inexhaustible is the ingenuity of fate when it wants to annoy weak
mortals! More difficult, alas, turned out to be possible and soon arose in front of our
friends in the very concrete guise of powerful frontal cloud cover, not provided for by
the weather report, but nevertheless impudently spread out in front, exactly
according to the course of flight.

What to do?

To consider the attempt to set the record to be unsuccessful, to wave the hand and
return without brainstorming home? None of the participants in the flight decidedly
liked this idea, as it was found by the subsequent picky survey. Before returning to
her, I wanted to sort out all the other possibilities. But which ones?

Climb higher and continue flying above the clouds?

But that would mean leaving the very only height at which the highest speed was
achieved.

There was only one thing left: “ignore” - continue on in the clouds, since there were
no signs of the proximity of thunderstorms and there was no reason to expect
anything dangerous for the strength of the aircraft from flying in the clouds. True, but
inevitably one had to expect another - piloting blindly, according to indirect, often
delayed readings of the arrows of numerous instruments. Blindly control where, with
a clear sky and a clear horizon, extreme clarity and uninterruptedly intense attention
were required! If you go back to the same analogy with a juggler, now in the clouds,
you had to not just juggle, but blindfold. And so, to perform not only a straight flight
in an extremely acceptable mode, but also an absolutely acrobatic curly turn!

Now, according to the calculation of time, it is time to fit into it. Each hundred meters
that the plane will slip past the Orshu checkpoint will be doubly harmful: after all, it
will also have to go through; therefore, a parasitic section of the path not taken into
account when calculating the average speed will double. No, you can’t miss a U-turn
command in any case. Now the radar operator must look (or rather listen) both: he is
responsible for communication with the outside world.

“... I see you.” I fix the passage, - the radar station finally reports from the ground.

And at that very second, Lipko vigorously pulls the control column toward himself
and turns the helm to the left.

I can imagine how a pilot’s gaze from instrument to instrument darted during this
turn: roll, overload, speed, rise, course, roll again, speed again ... Inertia presses the
body to the seat ... The ship trembles with tension ... It’s solid behind the cabin’s glass
panes a milky haze, but the pilot, who has worked with his inner eyes over the years
of flying, sees what a cunning, lying on the very verge of a possible curve his machine
describes.

The return trip seemed shorter to the crew. This, one might say, is a universal
pattern: a familiar, familiar road seems closer. Going somewhere to a new place for
yourself - it seems a bit far away. And you come back - as if faster. If you go through
the same route again, one wonders: why did it seem so far away at first!

It is only a pity that this regularity - the known, known, familiar, proceeds faster -
extends to the course of the years of human life: they run downhill and somehow run
faster.

However, the 103-M crew didn’t only seem to see the road to Moscow, but it really
was shorter: the rapid stratosphere winds blow mainly from west to east. Therefore,
the ground speed of the aircraft relative to the ground on the way back increased even
more.

After the ship, having flown over the final control point of the route, turned to its
airfield, landed safely and the crew talked about all the ups and downs of the flight
just ended, one of those who met shook his head and held out:

- Yes, you can’t say anything: the guys are desperate to fly!

I cannot agree with this. They flew boldly, skillfully, assertively - but not
desperately! It is impossible to detect any elements of the notorious “maybe” in
Lipko’s decisions and actions. He reliably knew what every sequential complication,
foreseen or not foreseen, so to speak, from the behavior of the machine at transonic
speeds to the degree of intensity of air flows possible in the cloud of a certain kind
encountered by him. He knew and made decisions (and further, as shown below, the
decisions are absolutely correct), correlating these complications with the capabilities
of the aircraft and people. Well, the fact that the exact calculation was emotionally
colored by the passionate desire of the pilots and the entire crew to fulfill the
intended goal is another matter. Without this, it is just as impossible to set records, or
even work as a tester, as well as without the above exact calculation ...

When all the materials were processed, the sports commissars established: the crew
flew a 103-km cargo plane with a 103-M jet aircraft at a distance of 1000 kilometers
with an average speed of 1028 kilometers per hour.

It is generally accepted that the numbers speak for themselves.

This is sometimes true. But in this case, figures alone - even such impressive for the
late 50s, such as 1028 kilometers per hour with 27 tons on board - are not enough. To
appreciate them, you still need to know how these figures were obtained ...

I want to remind: now I just gave examples. Wonderful, brilliant, outstanding - but

only examples. One could talk about many other record flights that are in no way
inferior to those that were discussed. And about the many record-breaking pilots who
showed the same flying art and the will to win, which our test pilot engineers
Ilyushin, Mosolov and Lipko flashed.

Of course, today, at the end of the 80s, one could cite as many arbitrarily more
modern examples as would have included other pilots, other vehicles, and most
importantly, other speeds, altitudes, and tonnages. The equipment does not stand
still, and aviation equipment - especially. But I began this book by not intending to
modify it. Otherwise, the atmosphere of time will disappear - which, it seems to me, is
significant in the history of our aviation.

And now back to the question of whether the record-breaking pilot and his entire
crew (by the way, not only flying, but not less ground) are related to the technical
capabilities of the machine, to what flight data it can show, let in the most skillful
hands.

It turns out it has. And the most direct.

The fact is that they set aviation records, as a rule, none other than test pilots — those
very people who “teach a plane to fly”, in dozens and hundreds of flights, identify and
eliminate everything that prevents this, and find the most effective methods piloting a
new machine, determine and verify the limits of what can be demanded of it. In a
word, people without creative work whose aircraft would not be what is required to
set a record.

Therefore, speaking of our aviation record holders, I highly appreciate their sporting
exploits, but I put all their dedicated testing activities even higher, without which
there could be no talk of any record flights. It is safe to say that all the testers who
became champions became champions not by chance.

True, this formula does not have retroactive effect: there is every reason to assert that
non-record testers remained non-record-breakers by accident. They could very well
be them! After all, all the components, the totality of which is necessary to set a
record - and the ability to quickly get used to the new, and trained will, and a high
level of piloting technology, and an accurate sense of the limits of the machine’s
capabilities, and, finally, this new machine itself, which naturally has higher data,
than its predecessors - all this is in the hands of the test pilot more (or, in any case,
chronologically earlier) than anyone else.

***

At the beginning of this chapter, it was said that a record flight is a side, side exit of
the test work business process. This, of course, is so. But it happens the other way
around - life obeys the laws of dialectics: preparation for a record, in turn, sometimes
leads to finds that are extremely fruitful for the development of all aviation
equipment, sometimes for many years. The history of aviation knows many examples
confirming this idea.

Now we are so used to the fact that the surface of the aircraft, and especially its wing,
is smooth, which we can’t even imagine how it could be otherwise.

But in the early thirties, when the TsAGI team of engineers led by A.N. Tupolev was
created a distant aircraft RD (ANT-25), the lining of the long, narrow wings of this car
was initially made of corrugated duralumin. At one time, such a constructive solution
was very progressive: the corrugation made it possible to obtain the desired strength
and stiffness with a relatively low weight.
The plane flew. Flown quite safely in the sense that things went without accidents or
other incidents, but not very safely according to the results: the estimated range of
the car missed.

Then one of the participants in the work, a representative of a group of scientists who
laid the foundations of flight tests, Max Arkadievich Taits, proposed to hide the
corrugation: pull a smooth percale lining on top of it.

This is not to say that the aerodynamic advantages of smooth skin were previously
unknown. Nevertheless, in aircraft building practice, it has not yet been widespread
at all: designers rarely go for any significant innovations out of a mere platonic love of
progress. But in this case, there was no place for the Platonic - the range of the
aircraft was not enough.

- And how much will the range increase if you make a smooth skin? Probably for
some bullshit? - doubted the skeptics.

- More than a thousand kilometers. This is guaranteed. And maybe more, ”answered

Thayz confidently (he sometimes liked, when some seemingly not very obvious
calculation was confirmed, to say in a slightly surprised tone of a person who had just
come to a new, somewhat even unexpected conclusion:“ It turns out , you can still
believe in science ”).

But then, among his interlocutors, not all believed in science. However - in

accordance with the well-known principle of “so bad and so bad” - we decided to try.

And the promised increase in range, as if by magic, happened!

I will not talk about many glorious record flights performed on this aircraft by Soviet
aviators. There was a world record of range on a closed route, and a non-stop flight to
the Far East, and flights through the North Pole to America.

I think that for all the unsteady memory of human flight, these are not yet forgotten.

But something else is interesting: as soon as the results of the flights of an

experimental taxiway with a new skin lay experimental points on graph paper sheets,
immediately smooth skin became an indispensable accessory for the wings and
fuselages of almost all newly designed, but already made and even flying new
planes. The open corrugation was over.

The record thanked for the attention to himself.

And now I can confess that I cheated a little, depicting the counter influence of an
aviation record on the development of science and technology that gave rise to it as a
phenomenon, or something secondary.

When the years pass, the external effect of the brilliant record itself disappears, the
glory of the pilots who set it fades (like, alas, all the glory on earth!), Then it usually
becomes clear: what, in essence, remains of all this once so noisy business? And it
turns out, it turns out, first of all, that it gave a record to science, technology, and
flight practice. What they managed to consolidate, take into service (sometimes not
only in the figurative sense of the word), transfer from a unique record aircraft to
aviation in general. What were the participants in setting the record - and behind
them all their ordinary and extraordinary colleagues - smarter, more experienced,
more skilled.

Because this is the most important thing for which testers take off from the beginning
of the existence of aviation to the present day.

Sixties testers
Sixties testers

So, we were replaced by a new generation of Soviet test pilots. What was it like? What
was different from us?

Here, following the old canons of everyday life, I probably should have complained
with dignified restraint on how much it lost in comparison with the previous one. Or,
on the contrary, following the canons of a more modern formation, shine with
objectivity and recognize among youth some (of course, fairly moderate) advantages.

But to follow any of these beaten paths is difficult: real facts interfere. Different, very
different were the test pilots of the fifties. They did not unify in the future.

And if we talk about some general trends in the development of the profession, then
more or less reliably can be traced, perhaps, only one: a new class of technology and -
one without the other - the general culture of the test pilot. This was required by new
aircraft - complex, densely saturated with all kinds of electronics and automation,
flying in all floors of the atmosphere, somewhere at the junction of sound and
thermal barriers. To create such a technique, to test it, finally, even just to fly it,
people had to have special, “collection” qualifications.

True, it cannot be said that at the time when I began my flight test life, among my
existing colleagues there were no testers of this class. Of course they were. But they
did not do the weather. A man like Yuri Konstantinovich Stankevich, the first in our
team a full-fledged, real test pilot and research engineer at the same time, was not the
rule, but a brilliant exception.

Grinchik, Sedov, Adamovich, Taroshchin, Efimov - all of us had to fight in time to

prove that higher education does not interfere (about what helps, there was no talk)
of successful flight test work.

But these times are long gone.

The face of our profession is imperceptibly, gradually, but radically changed. She still
demanded physical health, endurance, strong will and, of course, what I firmly
consider the first and main quality of a test pilot - an irresistible desire to be a test
pilot! All of this remains. But at the same time, high technical and engineering
training was required.

And, having understood this, the young test pilots of the fifties went to evening and
correspondence aviation universities. They studied in the evenings after daily flights,
especially exhausting in the first years of the test work, while a person, as they say,
goes into operation. And these guys went into operation, I must say, very
well. Despite - no, now let’s say without hesitation - thanks to their clever technical
aspirations, they quickly won the right to the most complex and important
works. Famous test pilots V.P. Vasin, A.N. Izheim, V.A. Komarov, G.K. Mosolov,
V.A. Nefyodov approached the ranks of first-class test pilots almost simultaneously
with obtaining engineering diplomas.

And no less famous V.S. Ilyushin, A.S. Lipko, A.A. Shcherbakov first became

engineers, and only after that test pilots. The paths are different, but the result is the
same.

Moreover, many old, experienced, honored test pilots, who, it would seem, even
without this, had enough work and honors, and all kinds of life benefits, were drawn
to science. Hero of the Soviet Union Colonel S.F. Mashkovsky was first made to talk
about himself when, as a very young pilot, he distinguished himself in battles during
the Japanese-Mongol conflict on the Khalkhin-Gol River. During the Great Patriotic
War, he increased his fame and, as an outstanding master of air combat, was sent to
flight test work. And here he was far from the last. But, having subtly felt the spirit of
the times, he, already a mature tester, and in his years far from being “suitor”,
entered the evening department of the Aviation Institute. Stepan Filippovich did not
want to live on interest from previously earned capital. Unfortunately, he did not
have time to graduate:

An engineer test pilot from a white crow, who was once listed, turned into the central
figure of our business. Now this trend of time is even legalized formally: an
engineering diploma is one of the prerequisites for obtaining the title of first-class
test pilot.

And in the combat units of the Air Force, and in Civil Aviation Units, the majority of
flight personnel are engineer pilots, graduates of higher flight schools. This is the
requirement of life.

I recall how the first post-flight debriefings took place, of which I happened to be a
witness and participant. Barely catching his breath after the flight, changing his
clothes and washing himself in the shower (and sometimes without washing,
changing his clothes and taking his breath - it depended on the urgency of the matter
and the temperament of the test leaders), the pilot sat down at the table with
engineers and scientists and told them about the assignment. He was asked
questions, and to the extent of his observation and understanding of the essence of
the matter, he answered them. Of course, the attitude of all those gathered to the
person who returned from the flight was the most respectful. They listened to him
very carefully, did not interrupt, did not reproach, if something, from the point of
view of the engineers, the essential turned out to be unnoticed. Due reverence was
fully respected.

Nevertheless, an invisible wall separated the speaker from his listeners. After being at
the parsing for three minutes, you accurately determined who the pilot was here, even
if he was no different from the other participants in the clothes and appearance.

The whole atmosphere of this analysis resembled something like a report of a

sergeant-scout to the generals of the headquarters of the compound: one knows the
specific facts, and the other is the place of these facts during the unfolding events.

Another thing is now. Today, post-flight analysis is primarily an act of mutual

creative communication of all its participants without exception. Facts, hypotheses,
analysis of instrument records, approximate calculations on a blackboard, pieces of
paper, cigarette boxes, as, probably, in any scientific laboratory: physical, biological,
chemical. Everything is on an equal footing. You know that one or several
participants in this heated conversation half an hour ago obtained fresh food for him
in the air - experimental facts. But they, these people, do not differ from the rest
either in the level of their statements, or in the terminology used, or in anything
else. Even in appearance, because the notorious “bronze” aviation tan in the age of
airtight cabins, bulky oxygen masks and flight helmets with visors, light filters is
gradually being forgotten. And about that the so-called "typical" test pilots with
stone-willed faces ("looks like a pilot - doesn't look like a pilot") are much more
common on movie screens than in the cockpits of experienced aircraft, I already
wrote. And not in appearance, of course, the main thing.

The main thing is in the steady process of connecting the flight testing corporation
with the "brain trust" of our business - a group of people who, without exaggeration,
have created the existing equipment and methods for testing aircraft in flight and
turned it into a separate important branch of modern aviation science.

Almost all his creative life worked in the field of flight tests and research
A.V. Chesalov, M.A. Taits, V.S. Vedrov, N.S. Stroyev, V.V. Utkin, A.M. Znamenskaya,
G.S. Kalachev, V.L. Alexandrov, B.I. Egorov - it was they and their closest employees
who laid the foundations for both the science of flight tests and the organization of
this business. Without their creative work, flight tests would never go beyond what is
commonly called creeping (in this case, it would be more appropriate to say “flying”)
empiricism. A lot of scientists - V.F. Bolotnikov, V.P. Vetchinkin, B.T. Goroshchenko,
A.N. Zhuravchenko, I.V. Ostoslavsky, Yu.A. Pobedonostsev, V.S. Pyshnov,
V.N. Matveev, dealing mainly with other areas of aviation science, nevertheless
invested a lot of creative work at different stages of his life and in flight tests.

A lot of interesting information can be told about the activities of these and many
other scientists, about the personal contribution of each of them to science and the
practice of flight tests. But this will be another book, or rather, other books. And of
course, they will be written ...

Somewhere between the “brain trust” and the flight crews leaving the air (or rather,
both of them simultaneously), one of the central figures of any flight experiment takes
its place - a leading engineer. A thousand of the most diverse responsibilities lie on
his long-suffering shoulders: preparing a test program and drawing up a task for the
next flight, managing the installation of recorders and processing their records after
landing, centering the machine and lists of improvements ... Among all this, even the
personal participation of a leading engineer in a test flight is often perceived by him
by ourselves in the form of a kind of insignificant appendage.

Over the years, I had to work with such brilliant leading engineers and leading
designers as E.K. Stoman, M.I. Kheifets, V.Ya. Molochaev, D.I. Kantor,
I.M. Pashkovsky, A.T. Karev, I.A. Erlich, R.A. Razumov, A.I. Nikonov, I.G. Tsar'kov
and many others. Great power - a reliable, real, leading engineer in the full sense of
the word!

However, I repeat once again, it is impossible to draw a clear line between these three
categories - test pilots, leading engineers and the “brain trust”. And our aviation
scientists themselves did not have the habit of especially staying too late for
calculations in their laboratories.

There are no words, the calculations, of course, were carried out - you cannot live
without science or technology, it was not without reason that the French
mathematician Emil Borel so accurately said that "people's knowledge deserves the
name of science, depending on what role the number plays in them."

But nevertheless, the main laboratory of the “brain trust” was and remains ... air - a
test flight area stretching for hundreds of kilometers. And the aforementioned
pundits (especially at first, while age allowed, and the authorities didn’t find fault
with it) more than once, putting on parachutes, took seats in aircraft cabins and took
off in order to look with their own heads at some other unexpected unexpected
phenomenon that came to light .

It was not by chance that I mentioned parachutes - sometimes they turned out to be
very handy! Still, a laboratory in the air has its own characteristics, and the failure of
a scientific experiment undertaken in it is sometimes expressed in a very unpleasant
and, moreover, very specific form.

So, Doctor of Technical Sciences G.S. barely escaped from a plane that collapsed in
flight. Kalachev. And the honored worker of science and technology, Professor
A.V. Chesalov owed his life to a parachute even twice: once he had to jump out of an
airplane without getting out of a tailspin, and another time - from a burning car. He
himself did not decrease from this taste for flying — I had to see him more than once
as an observer on board — but Alexander Vasilievich began to be careful with the
flight activities of his employees.

Once, on one new machine that we tested, strange vibrations appeared. The

apparatus designer, shrugging his shoulders in disbelief, said that “there shouldn’t be
any like them” (I didn’t, however, have met a constructor who would say that the
detected defect “should have been” - so to speak, was directly included in his
calculations) . Then one of the founders of our “brain trust” M.A. The Thai, who led
this test, without thinking twice, got into the car and took part in the next test flight
on it.
He was already caught after landing, when with a parachute on his shoulder he
cheerfully followed from the aircraft parking to the hangar. Chesalov saw the intruder
and, leaning out of the window — right from the third floor — asked menacingly: on
what, for what, and with whose permission did Thayz go into the air? To the not quite
intelligible (especially on the last point - “with whose permission”) Max Arkadevich’s
answers were followed by a categorical and very loud order:

- Thai! I do not allow you to fly on all ... shit!

The stormy reaction of numerous admired listeners (the hangar area, as always, was
full of people) caught the participants of this meaningful interview somewhat by
surprise. But it was too late - it already entered the golden fund of our airdrome
folklore and the indicated participants no longer belonged ...

No, our brain trust was not made up of cabinet scientists.

In any case, not from the cabinet ones alone.

***

In order to fully, fully penetrate the aerobatic spirit, the scientists of our institute -
this was before the war - decided to “take the helm” themselves. Or, more precisely,
by the handle, since the U-2 light-engine training aircraft, on which they were going
to fly, was controlled precisely by the handle, and not by the helm.

No sooner said than done. And every morning, when the weather allowed, our test
airfield turned into a training one. Several small green U-2 biplanes took off one after
another, made a classic “box” around the airfield and again landed. Institutional test
pilots acted as instructors, as they would say now, “on a voluntary basis”.

With laughter, a joke, endless reciprocal practical jokes, things moved forward. And
the crowning popularity of this undertaking was the appearance at the airport of
Professor V.P. Vetchinkina - a world-famous scientist, student and colleague
N.E. Zhukovsky. Vetchinkin did a lot, in particular, in the field of flight tests close to
us. The Flying Laboratory founded by him in 1918 was perhaps the first truly
scientific flight research organization in our country.

Having come to us, Vladimir Petrovich said that twenty-odd years before, in 1916, he
had successfully completed a training course in flying on the Farman-4 and even
Farman-20 airplanes. The professor mentioned especially “Farman-20” very
meaningfully: apparently, at that time the “twenty” was quoted as a machine quite
serious and requiring a skilled pilot’s hand.

Having finished his memories, Vladimir Petrovich announced that he was going to ...
restore his former skills - to learn to fly again. Yes, yes, it is to fly! He wants to
personally check in the air some of his new thoughts on the dynamics of the indignant
movement of the aircraft.
I don’t know whether the TsAGI authorities believed in the prospects of such plans or
simply didn’t want to offend such a respected person by refusal, but I got a command:
to teach Vetchinkin to fly.

Having arrived at the plane, I found my "cadet" already in the cockpit. He arrived at
the parking lot so promptly that no one even managed to warn the mechanics about
it. And - alas! - the case began with a misunderstanding. The mechanic interpreted
the professor’s laconic message that he “came to fly” in the sense that this mobile,
energetic man with a warlike beard sticking out, of course, was none other than the
next representative of our many urban and rural chefs, who were supposed to ride
from time to time on airplanes (as far as I remember, patronage was mainly limited
to this - they were digging potatoes at that time themselves). Acting in accordance
with this hypothesis, the mechanic helped Vetchinkin to sit in the cabin, tightly fitted
the seat belts to him, and after finishing this procedure, he pointed his finger at the
levers and control pedals and said with benevolent guidance:

- You see, grandfather, there are different things stuffed. So watch how you fly, don’t
touch anything! Keep your hands on your knees and look around you.

After listening to the mechanic, Vladimir Petrovich frowned and answered with
profound thoroughness:

- Unfortunately this is not possible. I specially arrived here with the goal of touching
everything.

My appearance on the scene helped to restore mutual understanding, and we went -

as they say in the theater posters: "for the first time after renewal" - into the air.

“I have no doubt about the flight control,” said my unusual account after landing. -
Here you have to get used to take-off and especially landing: the landing speed is very
great!

The U-2 training plane, on which we flew, landed at a speed of about sixty kilometers
per hour. Even picky ORE inspectors do not find this speed excessive. Therefore,
Vetchinkin’s statement could only be interpreted as a joke. Elementary politeness did
not allow me to respond to any, even if not very, from my point of view, a successful
joke of an elderly respected person with icy silence. Therefore, I, simulating a
chuckle, slurred inarticulate. And, as it turned out right away, he grunted in vain.

- In vain you laugh, Mark Lazarevich. Farman Twent had a landing speed of thirty
kilometers per hour, and U-2 had sixty. Assuming that the impact on the pilot’s
mental sphere is proportional to the square of the speed, we get that the voltage when
landing on the U-2 is four times higher than on the “Farman-20”!

Arithmetic was accurate. It was not necessary to object.

By this time, many scientists and engineers who studied at our "flight school" -
M.V. Keldysh, M.A. Thayts, N.S. Stroyev, G.S. Kalachev, V.A. Kotelnikov and others -
already flew to the U-2 on their own, without an instructor on board. But Vetchinkin
was hardly seriously planning to follow suit. And the motives that he exhibited — a
“one-handed” test of some scientific ideas in flight — looked, frankly, not very
convincing. Most likely, this great scientist and far from a young man was simply
pulled into the air, all the attractive power of which he felt in his youth.

It was impossible to treat this without understanding, sympathy and respect.

***

The flight-pedagogical experience that I obtained in my flights with Vladimir

Petrovich Vetchinkin was continued only after a few years. Of course, before and after
that, I had to deal more than once with my colleagues on certain problems of the
flight test methodology, as well as “let out” professionally flying pilots on new types of
aircraft for them. But that was a completely different matter: from the issuer in such
cases, it was only required that a few comments be made on the main features of the
machine and the recommended flight modes. It was not instructor work, in its pure
form, so to speak. I had to seriously deal with it only at the School.

Schools are different.

We say: Russian school of classical dance. Or: the physics school of the academician
of such and such. There are, of course, flight test schools in that sense of the word. In
the end, every test pilot - knowingly or unconsciously - is a follower of some of them.

But there is also the School of Test Pilots in the most direct, literal sense. School is
like an educational institution. It was created in our aviation industry shortly after
the end of the war. Subsequently, it expanded, got stronger, received the name of the
Flight Training Center, but old-timers continue to call it the old way - the School.

I would like to start the story about the first head of this unique institution from afar.

In the mid-thirties, the attention of aviation lovers and graphic enthusiasts (and
especially lovers of both) attracted a series of drawings by Leningrad artist Georgy
Vereisky — portraits of aviators. Interest in this series was caused not only and not so
much by the fact that the air fleet at that time was very much “getting into
fashion”. What attracted above all else: the artist’s ardently talented, passionate,
partisan, I would even say, loving attitude to the people he depicts (I don’t presume to
invade the subtle area of the theory of fine art, but maybe something like that is
present in every way a real good portrait?).

On one of the sheets of this series was depicted a thin, sharp-eyed, mobile (I can’t
explain how, but a motionless drawing conveyed the extreme mobility of nature with
no doubt beyond certainty) a man with two major sleepers and a flying bird in his
buttonhole. As follows from the signature, the figure depicted in this figure was an
excellent pupil of combat training, pilot M.V. Kotelnikov. Of course, I couldn’t know
then that many years of good would await me, meeting this outstanding person, and I
simply became interested in the portrait as such.

Soon Kotelnikov switched from combatant to test work. Before the war, he ran,
experiencing serial high-speed bombers, at one of the oldest aircraft plants.
And as soon as the war began, Kotelnikov went to fight. True, he was not alone in
this: a good half of test pilots then dispersed along the fronts. Everyone wanted to do
everything personally, depending on him - the pilot, namerenok - in order to achieve
victory. In addition, there was very little test work: then the official doctrine reigned
according to which the war was not to last long, and if so, then what is the point of
testing new technology that will certainly not keep up with the matter? Based on this
logic, the test flights were almost halved, and a significant part of the pilots freed
up. Forcibly keeping them in the rear really made no sense.

He ended the war Kotelnikov major general of aviation, the commander of the IL-2
stormtrooper division, widely known for its military affairs. He retained both the
sharp-eyedness and mobility, once captured by Vereisky, although he had lost it - I
would say: he resolutely lost it! - the inherent thinness at that time.

It was hardly possible to find the best candidate for the post of organizer and first
head of the Test Pilot School, which would combine flight test experience with
combat experience, leadership experience and, finally, just everyday, human
experience.

Together with Mikhail Vasilyevich, his closest assistants, D.T. Mazur, instructors-

pilots B.V. Melnikov, V.E. Boyko, P.P. Moskalenko (one of the most famous pilots of
polar aviation) and, of course, test pilots themselves, formally not among the School
staff, but who worked a lot when selecting and training the first students. True, it
couldn’t be otherwise: who better than acting test pilots imagines what the “products”
of this unique educational institution should look like, which means what and how
people should be taught in it.

Of these social activists, the test pilot Leonid Ivanovich Taroshchin worked most of
all at the School - one of the first Soviet reactors, flying many dozens of aircraft types,
a certified engineer, and most importantly, a cheerful, groovy person who quickly
knew the psychology of students and easily found the key to each of them.

I was instructed to conduct flight test classes at the School.

At first it was pretty hard. Everything here was unique: both the composition of the
students, and the course that had to be compiled for them anew, so to speak, “from
scratch”, and the very order of classes — I lectured in the classroom, and then I got on
a plane with each of my students (most often a two-seat fighter) to work out the tricks
in the air that I just talked about at the board. I’m not sure that all this worked out
perfectly for me. Say what you like, but the experience - and instructor, and generally
pedagogical - I clearly did not have enough. But there were nowhere to take the
people necessary for the School — testers, teachers and instructors at the same
time. We got a similar combination only a few years later in the person of the School’s
graduates, who worked as testers for some time after its completion, and then
returned to it as instructors, such as V.A. Komarov, M. K. Agafonov, M.M. Kotelnikov
(son of the first head of the School), P.I. Nuzhdin, G.S. Tegin, L.V. Fomenko.

But all the imperfections in the teaching methodology, as well as the inexperience of
the trainers, were more than compensated by the first set of students themselves -
their purposeful capacity for work, greed for knowledge, an active desire to become
real testers.

And this their desire, at least among the vast majority of graduates, came
true. Subsequently, their fates developed differently - capricious, changeable, far from
all long aviation fates! But it is difficult to find among the first graduates of the School
one that would not be discussed in the flying environment for one reason or another
in the years immediately following graduation.

Vasily Arkhipovich Komarov - I already talked about him as one of the first (if not the
first) among young testers who received the qualification of an aviation engineer on-
the-fly - especially distinguished himself by participating in the tests of heavy, non-
maneuverable passenger airplanes for stalling. In this obviously dangerous,
absolutely wild position for such a ship, they drove him on purpose. They drove to
find ways out if something like this happened spontaneously under the influence of
powerful air disturbances in the jet streams of the stratosphere. The path to security
lies through danger — such is the dialectic of aviation.

Participation in such tests together with experienced pilots Anokhin, Kovalev,

Khapov was for Komarov a kind of matriculation certificate.

And Fyodor Ivanovich Burtsev, who had been the head of the School for several years
in the future, had the chance to show what he was capable of under other conditions:
starting on a tiny jet airplane "from the suspension" - from under the wing of a heavy
carrier aircraft. Practicing such a start is a problem in itself. But this did not end
there. Next, a small nimble car was driven to the target by an autopilot. It’s not very
nice to fly at low altitude with a fair speed, without control in your hands! This is the
case when "idleness" is worse than the hardest work. Moreover, the autopilot also did
not work very reliably at first: for its refinement, these sharp flights had to be
repeated many times. True, the pilot could turn off the automation at any time and
take control. To do this, it was only necessary to throw a single toggle switch - there
he is, in the most prominent place on the dashboard. But when to do it? A second of
delay - and it will be too late: the tests were carried out, I repeat, at a very low
altitude. The second “lead”, when something abnormal in the operation of
automation barely begins to appear, and the whole flight can be considered failed: the
defect was not fixed on the tapes of the recorders, did not show itself, did not give the
material needed for fine-tuning. A narrow path between a steep cliff into the
irreparable and a sheer wall of the unknown. The test pilots S. Anokhin, S. Amet-
Khan, V. Pavlov and quite young at that time Burtsev managed many times to follow
this unforgiving path. - and the whole flight can be considered invalid: the defect was
not fixed on the tapes of the recorders, did not show itself, did not give the material
necessary for fine-tuning. A narrow path between a steep cliff into the irreparable and
a sheer wall of the unknown. The test pilots S. Anokhin, S. Amet-Khan, V. Pavlov and
quite young at that time Burtsev managed many times to follow this unforgiving
path. - and the whole flight can be considered invalid: the defect was not fixed on the
tapes of the recorders, did not show itself, did not give the material necessary for fine-
tuning. A narrow path between a steep cliff into the irreparable and a sheer wall of
the unknown. The test pilots S. Anokhin, S. Amet-Khan, V. Pavlov and quite young at
that time Burtsev managed many times to follow this unforgiving path.
The work of Yuri Timofeevich Alasheev was perhaps most widely known. It fell to him
for the first time to take to the air and fully experience in flight one of the milestones,
marking a new page in the history of aircraft aircraft - the Tu-104 passenger jet. Now
many jet passenger planes fly on the airways of the Soviet Union and the whole
world. And it’s bitter that Yura Alasheev cannot and will never be able to enjoy this
with us ...

Alexander Ivanovich Kazakov immediately after school got to a large aviation

plant. Soon he was appointed as a co-pilot on a car that was undergoing control tests
under an expanded program. In one of the flights under this program, it was required
at a high altitude and at a very solid speed - in the immediate anticipation of the
sound barrier - to perform an energetic maneuver with a given overload. For a long
time the debate lasted: was this task feasible at all? But this is already waving his fists
after the fight. And in flight, a ship weighing tens of tons fell into an uncontrolled,
unsystematic fall, in which there was something from a tailspin, and from a wave
crisis, and in general the devil knows what!

The ship’s commander, pilot M., was unable to regain control and, evaluating the
situation as hopeless, hastily ordered:

- The crew leave the plane! Eject immediately!

And then he shot himself in the air. But the catapult was not designed for use in this
mode. Neither the ship's commander, nor the crew members who carried out his
command were saved ...

Talking about this tragedy, the easiest way would be to compare the actions of the
pilot M. to the behavior of capital, the first to flee a ship in distress, to betray him
with unconditional condemnation. But in reality, the matter was more complicated:
according to all existing rules, the pilot leaves the last controlled aircraft. If the
controllability of the machine is lost, he does it simultaneously with the whole
crew. M. clearly believed that the situation was just that — the ship was
uncontrollable. In fact, at that moment it was so. But maybe the car can still be picked
up again? The ship commander failed to correctly evaluate this. And he paid with his
life for his mistake. It is sometimes difficult in aviation to draw a clear line between
error and guilt! Probably, in this case it was nevertheless both that and another ...

What about Kazakov? Cossacks did not lose composure. Either he felt that all this
jumble was somehow connected with the wave crisis and in the lower, denser and
warmer layers of the atmosphere should stop by itself, or he simply decided that the
height reserve was still large and there was no point in ejecting eight kilometers when
it will not be too late to do it at three.

One way or another, he stayed in place, kept - almost by the collar - those crew
members who had not yet managed to leave the car, and continued stubborn,
methodical attempts to bring her into a normal position.

And - here it is, the reward for composure and perseverance! - the plane eventually
obeyed! It is not without reason that they say that a pilot who used ninety-nine out of
a hundred chances in a difficult situation cannot believe that he has done
everything. There is another hundredth chance!

When Kazakov safely landed the car at his airfield, he was first asked:

“Why didn't you catapult?”

And then the pilot realized that, barely getting out of one difficult situation, he
immediately fell into another, not much less acute, although lying in a completely
different - purely ethical - plane. To answer that he had not left the car, since he
considered it premature, meant casting a shadow on the actions of the commander,
whose death Kazakov at that moment still did not know. What to say? Could not
eject? They will ask: why? And Kazakov mumbled something vaguely that,
supposedly, the catapult did not work.

However - this is a feature of most ethical conflicts - pulling his tail, Kazakov
hopelessly stuck his nose. It turned out to be almost chivalric in relation to
everyone. The version with the failed catapult somehow helped the first pilot, but ...
immediately put other people in the position of the accused - primarily the
technicians responsible for preparing the rescue equipment. As one would expect, the
aforementioned technicians immediately rushed to the co-pilot’s seat and without
any difficulty found that the control wires were intact on them, which must be torn
off before bailout. The hastily composed version of "failed." Kazakov had to tell
everything how it was in reality. Moreover, by this moment he had already learned
about the tragic fate of his commander.

You can, of course, judge a young pilot for all these not very clever tricks. It’s not good
to say a lie. And indeed, probably, it is not good - this truth has been known to us
from early childhood.

But I could not refrain from telling the whole story in such detail because I see in the
behavior of Kazakov not only professionally valuable traits: composure, perseverance,
methodology, but also great human nobility. It is relatively easy to find people who
are able to behave themselves in dangers. Much less than those for whom it is far
from the most important thing, how it will look from the outside. Kazakov proved
himself to be just such a person. Professional in cases like the above is inextricably
intertwined with the ethical. And when Alexander Ivanovich Kazakov was the first of
the School graduates to receive the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, it was a great joy
for all his comrades, colleagues and teachers.

And Dmitry Vasilyevich Zyuzin came to the School as a Hero: during the war years
the name of this fighter was well known in the Black Sea. From the point of view of
the so-called "career", he stood, as they say, on completely solid rails. But measured
promotion in ranks, positions and titles did not attract Zyuzin. He was drawn to a
new creative business - flight tests. At School, he did well - both in the audience and
in the air. I remember how I tried to release it, an “inveterate” fighter, without freight,
from one familiarization flight, on a twin-engine transport aircraft. And this
experiment was a success. Zyuzin flew flawlessly, once again confirming my ancient
belief that there are no “natural” fighters, bombers or attack aircraft, but there are ...
good and bad pilots. In the future, Dmitry Vasilievich did a good job in testing
experimental aircraft in the design office of A.N. Tupolev. And, among other things, it
was he who was almost the first Soviet test pilot to take up the pen: his informative
and interestingly written book “Test of Speed” was recognized by readers and quickly
disappeared from the shelves of bookstores.

Leonid Ivanovich Minenko, who was a ground attack aircraft during the war, became
a tester of supersonic fighters after graduating from the School and found himself in
this role so much that only a few years later he became the head of a strong team of
test pilots at one of the largest aviation plants.

And the former dive-pilot Valentin Mikhailovich Volkov quickly gained a leading
position in the design bureau of a universal profile, which produced bombers,
fighters, and training aircraft. So the valuable property of the tester - universality -
turned out to be necessary for Valentin Mikhailovich not only for “general erudition”,
but for everyday, ongoing work.

Good, successful was the first graduation of the School!

However, the subsequent ones were no weaker.

They gave us such outstanding test pilots as A.P. Bogorodsky, V.P. Vasin,

O.V. Gudkov, V.S. Ilyushin, A.S. Lipko, G.K. Mosolov, V.A. Nefyodov, V.P. Smirnov,
A.G. Fedotov, Yu.A. Shevyakov, A.A. Shcherbakov, you won’t scold them all, skilled,
perfectly knowledgeable, talented, cultured, courageous testers.

It would be hard to name the best of them!

I say this in conditional form “would”, because I am deeply convinced that even
setting such a task seriously is completely pointless. True, in some newspaper articles
and essays attempts were made to hang on one or the other representative of our
profession the label "Pilot No. 1" or "The Most Important Pilot."

Alas, in reality there are none in nature. No, for the simple reason that it is impossible
to “number” representatives of any creative profession of any kind. It is impossible to
determine who was “better”: actress Savina or actress Ermolova, lawyer Plevako or
lawyer Karabchevsky, commander Tolbukhin or commander Vatutin (I deliberately
choose examples from wonderful people who have long been no longer alive in order
to avoid the danger of being distracted by the discussion of the examples themselves )

“The most important pilot,” if we are to search for him, is a figure ... synthetic. It can
be created by combining the technique of piloting one, the careful courage of another,
the technical culture of the third, the iron health of the fourth ...

By the way, I happened to somehow observe the reaction of one of the pilots, whom
the overwhelming enthusiastic fans titled in the eyes with the notorious “first
number”.

He grimaced.

***
An endless chain of memories. One pulls the second after it, the second pops up in
the memory of the third - and so on without end.

But you won’t remember everything experienced during decades in aviation, and even
less so.

We must put an end somewhere.

When a person takes up a pen, he always does this for some specific purpose. There
was such a goal, of course, and the author of these notes.

I wanted to keep in my memory people unique events in the history of aviation, which
I was lucky to witness.

I wanted to talk about the true, internal essence of the profession of a test pilot. A
profession that, for all its apparent (judging at least by the frequency of its mention in
the press) popularity, few people really know in all its depth, complexity, creative
content.

I would like to tell even more about the people of this profession - outstanding,
wonderful people, many of whom I had a chance to know closely and see almost in
business almost daily. And speaking of them, also try to straighten out the
traditionally wrong accents - to return to their places the main and secondary in their
appearance.

And I felt one more, special duty for myself: to remember those of our comrades who
did not regret for the sake of progressing the beloved work of their life! (Remember
how in the military oath of our army: "... not life itself"?)

I wrote about what I saw.

Of course, it would be naive to expect from me a fearlessly objectivist story about my

people — pilots, mechanics, engineers, scientists — among whom I lived a large and
probably the happiest part of my life.

Nevertheless, in setting forth the facts, I never retreated (at least intentionally) from
the truth.

I began these notes with the fact that everything told in them is true.

With these same words, I want to finish the book.