Is it very typical for Russian planes to fall from Ukrainian missiles? Have you already counted a lot?
It sounds blasphemous to mention a Ukrainian missile after such events:
1 Malaysian Boeing shot down by a beech tree (the report of the Dutch prosecutor's office proves this irrefutably)
2 On the night of June 14, 2014, a military transport aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force Il-76 was shot down by a shot from an anti-aircraft missile system and a long burst from a heavy machine gun while landing at the airfield in Lugansk. There were 40 Ukrainian military personnel and 9 crew members on board the Il-76. They all died. This feat was celebrated Wagnerians, who were in Ukraine at that time. The Ukrainian special service has documentary information that part of the “Wagnerites” fired at the Lugansk airport almost every day in the summer of 2014.
What if we remember history?
On September 1, 1983, a tragedy occurred in the skies over the Pacific Ocean, which some Russian sources bashfully call an “incident” to this day: a Soviet air defense fighter shot down a South Korean civilian airliner that violated the air border of the USSR. All 269 people on board, including 23 children, were killed.
Boeing 707 crash in Karel II
Everyone is now hearing about the crash of the Malaysian Boeing over the Donbass. Less known, but nevertheless known about it, is the story of how a South Korean Boeing was shot down over the Soviet Far East on September 1, 1983. It turns out that this is not the first South Korean Boeing shot down over the Soviet Union. There was one more.
On April 20, 1978, in the area of the Kola Peninsula over the territory of the USSR, another South Korean Boeing 707 was shot down, flying on the route Paris - Anchorage - Seoul
On April 20, 1978, in the area of the Kola Peninsula, the USSR border was crossed by a diverted passenger Boeing-707-321B (HL7429) of Korean Air Lines (KAL), operating flight 902 - Paris-Anchorage-Seoul.
The Korean Boeing continued to fly towards Severomorsk. Dmitry Tsarkov, who in 1978 held the position of commander of the 21st Air Defense Corps of the USSR, reports to Vladimir Dmitriev, who at that time held the position of commander of the 10th Air Defense Army of the USSR, that the air defense is ready to shoot down the intruder. Dmitriev did not give permission, saying that we could shoot down our plane; the exact identity of the plane was not yet clear. The offender was walking at a speed of 15 kilometers per minute (900 km/h). At this time, the intruder crossed the border of the USSR. A flight of fighters was lifted into the sky.
The plane was detected by Soviet air defense radars and initially identified as a Boeing 747. The anti-aircraft missile system was put on alert. A Su-15TM fighter ("Flegon-F") under the control of Captain A. Bosov was sent to intercept.
According to the testimony of the captain of the airliner, Kim Chang Kee, the interceptor approached his plane from the right side (and not from the left, as required by the rules of the international civil aviation organization - ICAO). The captain states that he reduced his speed and turned on his navigation lights, indicating that he was ready to follow the Soviet fighter for landing. Attempts by Captain Kim Chang Kee to contact the interceptor pilot on frequency 121.5 were detected by the air traffic control tower in Rovaniemi, Finland. According to the official statement of the Soviet side, the airliner evaded the requirement to land. When the interceptor pilot reported that the intruder was in fact not a 747, but a Boeing 707, the command decided that it was an RC-135 electronic reconnaissance aircraft (produced on the basis of the Boeing 707 airliner) and gave the order to destroy goals.
According to American radio intercepts, the interceptor pilot tried for several minutes to convince the command to cancel the order, because he saw the KAL airline emblem on the airliner and inscriptions in hieroglyphs, however, after confirming the order, he fired two P-60 missiles at the liner. The first of them missed the target, and the second exploded, tearing off part of the left wing, causing depressurization of the aircraft and killing two passengers with fragments.
Due to depressurization of the cabin, the airliner began an emergency descent and disappeared from the radar screens of the Soviet air defense system. The interceptor pilot also lost the damaged airliner in the clouds.
Over the next hour, emergency flight 902 flew at low altitude across the entire Kola Peninsula, looking for a place for an emergency landing and, after several unsuccessful attempts, landed in the gathering dusk on the ice of Lake Korpiyarvi, already on the territory of Karelia. Throughout this entire time, the air defense had no information about the fate and location of the aircraft.
The USSR refused to cooperate in the investigation of this incident with international experts and did not provide data from the black boxes seized from the plane. The plane itself was dismantled and removed in parts. The Korean airline refused it so as not to pay for the evacuation of the plane. 95 passengers were taken to Kem, and then to Murmansk airport. On April 23, 1978, they were handed over to representatives of the US Consulate General in Leningrad and Pan American Airlines and sent to Helsinki. Su-15 pilot Captain A. Bosov was awarded the Order of the Red Star for completing a combat mission.
The Boeing commander, the highest-class pilot Lee Chang Hui, a former military pilot, managed to land a barely controllable 200-ton aircraft on a frozen lake. This saved the lives of the remaining passengers. The Boeing commander was later questioned. He said that he fought as a fighter pilot back in Vietnam. Finished fighting with the rank of colonel. Then he worked for 10 years in a civil airline, and also had 10 years of experience flying along the route of flight 902. He has been flying with this crew for 7 years. The last flight before this flight on this route was a week ago. The weather during the flight was good. When asked how you could have gone so off course, the commander replied that the navigation equipment had allegedly failed.
Years later, a flight map of Flight 902 was released based on declassified black box data, showing that the plane began a smooth, wide right turn shortly after reaching Iceland on the Amsterdam-Anchorage leg. This turn was too smooth to be done by hand, and The only explanation can be a malfunction of the navigation equipment.
As a result of an aircraft accident, the following several factors often have a damaging effect on the body of the victim simultaneously or in rapid succession, and the effect of one factor often overlaps with another:
1) dynamic and shock overloads;
2) counter air flow;
3) explosive decompression;
4) atmospheric electricity;
5) thermal effects;
6) toxic products of combustion and pyrolysis;
7) blunt objects located inside the aircraft;
8) blast wave;
9) external parts of the aircraft;
10) running engines;
11) high-altitude decompression;
12) shaking, vibration.
When an aircraft collides with an obstacle, it can cause overloads reaching very large values on the order of tens and even hundreds of g units. At the same time, the body is lifted off the back of the chair and held in place by seat belts. Depending on the magnitude of the overload, the consequences for victims can be of a different nature - from functional respiratory and circulatory disorders associated with the relative movement of the internal organs of the chest and abdomen, and loss of consciousness - to mechanical damage from seat belts in the form of abrasions, bruises, sometimes skin tears and soft tissues, spinal injuries, and in the event of an aircraft collision at high speed with an obstacle or the ground - in the form of gross damage to all tissues at the level of seat belts up to the separation of the upper torso. In the latter case, as a rule, subsequent significant destruction of the head and torso occurs as a result of the impact of these parts of the body on objects located in front.
Radial accelerations and corresponding overloads occur when trying to recover from a dive in emergency situations. In these cases, there is a significant displacement of soft tissues, internal organs and especially blood in large vessels, accompanied by a sharp disruption of breathing, blood circulation, functions of the central nervous system, visual impairment, loss of consciousness, as well as traumatic damage to tissues and vital organs.
When the overload is directed in the direction of the head and legs, a significant part of the circulating blood (up to 1/4 of the total mass) moves into the vessels of the abdominal cavity and extremities, as a result of which the work of the heart is disrupted, anemia of the brain develops with loss of consciousness. The outcome in such a situation will depend on the duration of the unconscious state and the flight altitude at which the loss of consciousness occurred. As a result of displacement and deformation of the internal organs and tissues of the abdominal cavity and a sharp overflow of them with blood, multiple hemorrhages can be observed in the intestinal mesentery, under the capsule and in the ligaments of internal organs, and loose fatty tissue.
Overloads directed from the legs to the head are much more difficult for a person to bear. Already at an acceleration of about 4-5 g, there is a strong rush of blood to the head, accompanied by redness and swelling of the face, nosebleeds, multiple small hemorrhages in the skin of the face, conjunctiva of the eyes, membranes and substance of the brain. A sharp increase in intracranial pressure leads to rapid loss of consciousness and death. In this case, fractures of the upper and lower extremities, compression fractures of the spine, fractures of the base and vault of the skull, and injuries to the soft extremities may be observed.
The oncoming flow of air at high flight speeds (800-1000 km/h or more) has the properties of a solid body, since the pressure force of the air flow under these conditions exceeds the weight of a person by 50-70 times. The oncoming air flow can tear off household items and clothing. When the oxygen mask breaks, a sharp deformation of the soft tissues of the face occurs with extensive hemorrhage and their detachment from the underlying bones, rupture of the corners of the mouth, and damage to the eyeballs. A jet of air penetrating under high pressure into the upper respiratory tract and esophagus can lead to barotrauma of the lungs and stomach; reflex breathing disorder and cessation of oxygen supply causes acute oxygen starvation. As a result of hands falling off the armrests and legs from the footrests,
scattering of limbs, accompanied by dislocations, sprained joint ligaments, muscle tears, and hemorrhages.
Explosive decompression is observed in flight at an altitude of over 8-9 thousand meters as a result of emergency depressurization of the cabin. As a result of a sharp drop in pressure, a person may experience barotrauma of the lungs and hearing aid, as well as gas embolism. Barotrauma of the hearing aid is accompanied by rupture of the eardrum, damage to the auditory ossicles, hemorrhage in the tissue of the middle and inner ear and the tympanic cavity.
With pulmonary barotrauma, there is liquid blood in the respiratory tract, acute swelling of the lungs, multiple focal hemorrhages and ruptures of the lung tissue. Along with the large-focal nature of changes in the lung tissue along the branches of the bronchi, small ruptures and hemorrhages are also observed.
Blunt objects located inside the aircraft are the main damaging factor when the aircraft falls and hits the ground. In this case, deformation and destruction of its structure occurs, as well as mutual displacement of people on the plane and the objects surrounding them. The resulting shock overloads, depending on the speed and angle of impact of the aircraft, can exceed hundreds and even thousands of times the impact forces on victims observed in ground transport accidents.
The result of shock overloads of enormous force can be gross destruction of the body with separation of individual parts of it (head, limbs, pelvic area) with extensive ruptures and crushing of the skin and soft tissues, crushing of bones, opening of body cavities and crushing, separation, displacement of internal organs or their ejection out.
The blast wave is the most powerful damaging factor resulting from a fuel explosion in fuel tanks or a terrorist attack. Most often, the first explosion occurs when the plane hits the ground, sometimes in the air after touching the ground. When a jet plane falls to the ground in a dive followed by an explosion, the crater can reach a depth of several meters. A powerful blast wave causes complete destruction of aircraft structures and bodies. In this case, the remains are found both in the crater itself and outside it, scattered over an area with a radius of up to 300-500 m. When an explosion occurs in the air after touching the ground, the remains of people who were on the plane are scattered at a distance of up to 3 km in the direction of flight and up to 1.5 km to the sides from the explosion site.
When the body is completely destroyed as a result of an explosion, individual small flaps of skin without abrasion of their edges, auricles with part of the temporal bone, pieces of internal organs, bone fragments with scraps of soft tissue, and sometimes hands, feet or parts thereof are usually found. During a terrorist attack, extensive injuries with detachments of body parts, multiple through and blind shrapnel wounds are received by persons located directly near the explosion site, while others most often die as a result of mechanical damage when the plane subsequently crashes and hits the ground.
As a result of the action of the flame, ignition of clothing, burns of the body, as well as post-mortem burning of corpses can occur, reaching extreme degrees with charring of soft tissues and bones until they are incinerated. Sometimes a fire is preceded by an explosion; in these cases, the remains of corpses are exposed to thermal effects.
31.10.2015 - 19:59
Egypt News. A tragedy that claimed 224 lives. There were 200 adults, 17 children and 7 crew members on board the plane. The bodies of those killed in the disaster began to be delivered to the Zenhom mortuary in Cairo on Saturday evening.
A search and rescue operation continues at the site of the Russian airliner crash in Egypt.
Let us remind you that a passenger plane flying from the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg. The airliner disappeared from radar screens less than half an hour after takeoff. Before this, the car suddenly began to lose altitude.
According to the latest data, 220 Russians, three Ukrainians and three died in the disaster.
It is already known that most of the passengers on the ill-fated flight were from St. Petersburg. Each line on the list of victims has its own story. Some were on vacation in Egypt, some were celebrating a wedding anniversary, some were celebrating a birthday. By and large, many came to the hot country as tourists.
Literally half an hour before the tragedy, this photo appeared on the page of a resident of St. Petersburg.
A beloved husband holds his beloved daughter in his arms. Their family turned four years old on October 27. Olga and Yuri, according to friends, were an incredibly happy couple, they valued and respected each other. Three nice children were born in love (all three were on vacation with mom and dad in Egypt). They loved to travel and preferred beach activities.
Olga Sheina with her daughter
In July we vacationed in Cyprus; we had long planned a trip to Egypt for October.
Tatiana and Alexey Gromov
As Tatyana wrote on her page on the social network, “ flew off to warm up" This was their first trip as a family. Before the flight from St. Petersburg, the happy mother took this photo.
Darina rests her hands on the glass and carefully examines the plane.
The grandmother of the “main passenger” did not want to let her granddaughter go to Egypt, saying that she was still just a baby, let her grow up a little. Darina’s parents insisted: “ Mom, nothing will happen. We'll soak our feet in the sea and come back».
Darina Gromova
The day before, Alexey called home and said that this vacation was the best and most significant, because the first trip “ full staff».
His father was a military pilot. Alexey wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps, but changed his mind. As a result, he built a career in an IT company.
Tatiana and Alexey Gromov
« They seemed the happiest in the world. Both their eyes shone with happiness“- this is what colleagues say
about 62-year-old Alexander Kopylov, deputy head of Pskov, and his wife Elena.
On October 27, the woman celebrated her 53rd birthday. The trips to Egypt were a gift from the husband in honor of his wife’s birthday.
Elena’s daughter, like dozens of daughters and sons whose lives were forever taken by the ill-fated flight from the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, refuses to believe what happened.
Among the passengers on the Airbus A321 aircraft was Elena Domashnyaya, a participant in the popular TV show “Top Model in Russian”.
Colleague of Elena Domashnaya on the project “Top Model in Russian”. Post on social networks
After the TV show, Lena did not give up modeling, continued to take part in photo projects, and received a diploma in journalism.
Elena Home
In two weeks the beauty would have turned 25 years old. The girl was planning a big celebration.
Elena flew to Egypt on vacation. She was accompanied by her friend and colleague Ksenia Ogorodova.
Ksenia Ogorodova
Ksenia called the autumn spent in paradise “ideal.” Palm trees, sea and sun. A few days ago, a girl boasted that she experienced rain for the first time in Egypt.
One of the Egyptian photographs of Ksenia Ogorodova shows how four young guys throw a girl, probably Ksenia herself, into a pool, and two fall after her. " Rescue of a drowning man. Very cheerful Polish families that don't let you get burned“- this is how the girl signed this photo.
This shot was the last.
32-year-old Katya Murashova was a participant in the beauty contest among married women - “Mrs. Pskov 2014”.
Ekaterina Murashova
As Catherine’s friends say, travel was literally the meaning of her life. She worked in the state department of social protection of the Pskov region, and devoted her free time to traveling with her family to different countries and cities. " Very sociable, open and kind person“- this is how Katya’s colleagues characterize her.
Nikolay Korolev, organizer of the beauty contest (Pskov Information Agency):
She was a loving mother and an optimistic person. Ekaterina always did everything well. She was a persistent, hardworking, kind and sympathetic woman. Even without winning the competition, she was not upset, because the process of growth and self-development was important to her. I remember her as a loving mother - she and her daughter had a very warm relationship. She was an optimistic, cheerful woman who loved life.
Ironically, one of the last entries left by Ekaterina Murashova on her social network page is an airplane icon and a song with the sad and, as it turned out, prophetic title “I know that I won’t come back.”
At the age of 27, the life of Alina Gaydamak from St. Petersburg was cut short.
Alina Gaydamak
Finland, Estonia, Cyprus, Thailand. The girl visited a dozen countries and dreamed of visiting as many more, definitely no less. A trip to Egypt appeared spontaneously in her plans.
Alina went on a trip to Israel. On the way back, I decided to fly through Egypt.
Elena and Alexander
The anniversary was celebrated in Egypt. The family planned to return home on October 31 in order to complete preparations for another significant date. On November 1, Elena would have turned 35 years old.
Desperate hope “what if it’s a mistake?” Relatives and friends of the Belarusian Roman Seredinsky live.
The 28-year-old young man was awarded a trip to Egypt for his good work. Nobody could have imagined that the holiday would end in such a tragedy.
Roman Seredinsky
Natalya Melnichenko has known Roma since school. We studied together from first grade. He remembers how we went on excursions to memorable places in Belarus, went hiking and to the river. About 10 years ago, a childhood friend left for St. Petersburg. All this time .
Natalya Melnichenok, classmate of Roman Seredinsky:
Roma was and will always remain a good, cheerful person for us.
The son of the dean of the St. Petersburg School of Economics and Management was vacationing at the resort with his beloved Alexandra.
On her Instagram page, Sasha Illarionova shared her impressions and posted photographs of the underwater world. Lenya and Sasha have recently become seriously interested in diving.
A week ago, Olga Kirillova enthusiastically told her friends that there was nothing better in the world than a vacation at sea.
Olga Kirillova
She calmly endured the heat and more than once noted how the sun adored her. The girl always came home with a luxurious tan.
In numerous photos she is smiling. Olga loved when people around her smiled, and then work was a pleasure. She made magnificent bouquets of flowers, and customers left enthusiastic comments on her social media pages.
One of Olga's last works
In Egypt, Olga Kirillova was vacationing with her best friend, 25-year-old Zhenya Sologubova.
They said about them, “do not spill water.” Indeed, the friendship between the girls was the strongest. " The most important thing in any vacation is good company.“, the girlfriends asserted.
Evgenia Sologubova
On the last day spent at the resort, Evgenia left a note on her online page with the words “ out of range” and several graphic emoticons. The girl, of course, said that she was out of the zone for the duration of the flight.
21-year-old table tennis coach Evgeny Yavsin was on vacation in Egypt with his girlfriend Alexandra Chernova.
Evgeny Yavsin and Alexandra Chernova
Evgeniy Yavsin
For their wards, friends and relatives, the news that the cheerful and purposeful Zhenya and Sasha were no more came as a real shock.
As Russian publications report, citing friends of the couple, Evgeniy invited Alexandra to relax in Egypt in order to propose to her.
« Wonderful friendly family“- this is how the Golenkov family from St. Petersburg was remembered.
Vladimir and Victoria Golenkov took their granddaughter Diana with them to the warm sea. In September the baby turned four years old.
Olesya Kosorukova from Novgorod is sure that time cannot be reconciled with pain. Her mother Natalya Rostenko was on board the Airbus A321.
In August, the woman retired and promised her family that she would take a little rest and upon her return she would help with her grandchildren. Natalia has five of them.
Natalya Rostenko during one of the trips
She vacationed in Sharm el-Sheikh seven times, was delighted with the resort and planned to return here in January to celebrate her birthday.
« I never thought that Egypt would evoke so many positive emotions in me. Do I want to live here? No. Will I come back here? Necessarily", wrote on Thursday evening
A 24-year-old resident of St. Petersburg on her social network page.
Victoria Sevryukova shared photos from the trip with her virtual friends. The girl enjoyed life and literally accompanied every photo with the hashtags “happiness is here” and “I don’t want to leave.”
Friends remember: Vika always traveled with her favorite pink suitcase.
Victoria Sevryukova
This thing seemed to confirm: the hostess is never in a bad mood.
Alexey and Oksana Semakova are another married couple who have registered on board.
The Semakovs
Both are in uniform: he is a fire inspector at the Ministry of Emergency Situations, she is an investigator at the police department. They escaped from cold Belomorsk to warmer climes for only seven days. Happy and rested, Oksana and Alexey planned to join the service with renewed vigor one of these days.
They were expected home with a lot of new impressions and gifts. But none of the passengers on flight 9268 were destined to be met by their relatives and friends at Pulkovo airport.
- Read more
Robert Jensen has built a career cleaning up the mess after major disasters: identifying remains, caring for the families of the victims, and recovering their personal belongings. That's how he became the best at the worst job in the world.
The team stumbled through the jungle. The group had little idea where they were going or what they would find there. A few days ago, search planes flying high above the foothills of the Andes spotted the wreckage of a crashed helicopter littering a steep, rocky slope. It was impossible to reach this chaos from the air, so the team had to dismount.
The group pushing through the brush was led by Robert Jensen, a tall, strong man wearing a white helmet with the letters "BOB" scrawled in marker on the front. They had to fight through the bushes for two days to get to the place. Six days later, Jensen will be the last one to leave. It was Jensen who was contacted first by the mining group Rio Tinto, which hired the crashed helicopter to fly employees from a Peruvian copper mine to the city of Chiclayo. It was Jensen who strategized how to get to the crash site when it became clear that all ten people on board were dead, and the wreckage was scattered across the winding mountain ridges of tropical Yosemite. Jensen assembled a team: two Peruvian police officers, two investigators, several forensic anthropologists and a group of national park rangers accustomed to climbing mountains on search-and-rescue expeditions. They all knew that this expedition would not be a rescue one.
Jensen is the person companies call when the worst happens. The worst is all those events that inspire such horror and panic that most people prefer not to think about them, such as plane crashes, terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Jensen has no special gift for collecting bodies, identifying personal items or talking to family members of the dead. What he does have is experience. Over the course of his long career, Jensen has spent decades earning a reputation as the best in this unusual business. As the owner of Kenyon International Emergency Services, Jensen receives between 6 and 20 applications per year worldwide (9 in 2016, not counting those that have continued since 2015). Because of his work, he constantly finds himself involved in events that give rise to the saddest headlines in modern history. He handled funeral work after the Oklahoma bombing, he flew straight to the Pentagon after 9/11, and he helped recover bodies when Hurricane Katrina hit.
The helicopter crash in Peru in 2008 didn't make international news, but the mission was memorable for Jensen because of its complexity. Everything was sticky from the heat, and the dangers of the jungle lurked everywhere. Jensen decided that the team would travel in pairs, out of fear of cougars and snakes. Before leaving, he carried out a risk assessment and learned that 23 species of venomous snakes live in this area. He only had antivenom for three, so he urged his team members to try to get a good look at who exactly bit them before losing consciousness, in case this happened.
They were there to collect everything they could - personal belongings, skeletal fragments and any evidence that would help the families of the victims understand how their loved ones ended their days. Before they could do all this, they had to get there. Jensen works as efficiently as possible: all possible difficulties have already been taken into account and resolved with military composure. Jensen instructed his team to start clearing a spot for the helicopter to land and for the climbers to string ropes up the slope so they could climb up and down. They collected each fragment into containers to then hand over to an archaeologist, who sifted through them in search of bone fragments. To the untrained eye, it would seem that nothing of value could be found: the flight data recorder had already been removed, and it was clear that there were no survivors. Still, Jensen searched.
In total, he and his team collected 110 skeletal fragments from the mountain, as well as some personal items and a cockpit recording device. The remains found by Kenyon allowed the identification of almost everyone on board, which is a rarity and a sign of skill when working with high-speed disasters. Every night the team buried what they found, holding moments of silence. The next morning, all the remains were exhumed and taken away by helicopter, and the team began work again.
After days of clearing the slope and collecting everything they could, Jensen suddenly saw something high in a tree up the slope - a large piece of human tissue caught on a branch. Getting there was incredibly risky, even with cables, but Jensen couldn't leave his find behind. He climbed up, collected what he found and placed it in a plastic bag. His work was done. Everything he found will be given to the families of the victims. “So they knew for sure that the bodies of their loved ones were not just left in the jungle,” Jensen remembers, “Not a piece.”
Context
The Tu-154 plane, which disappeared near Sochi, crashed in the Black Sea
RIA Novosti 12/25/2016Jerzy Bar about the Smolensk disaster
Wirtualna Polska 04/12/2016More than 60 people died in the disaster
Reuters 03/20/2016Why is EgyptAir having so many problems?
Expressen 05/20/2016Jensen doesn't have any heartbreaking rescue stories to tell. What he is looking for has a more abstract value - it is a part of a person, literally or figuratively, which he can return to the family of the deceased with the words: “We tried.” He knows from experience that when someone's life is shattered, even the smallest pieces can bring peace.
Many of the things Jensen and his team found went to Kenyon's offices in Bracknell, a town an hour's drive from London where there are as many carousels as people. From the outside, you wouldn’t be able to tell that this building was built for a service that deals with the consequences of mass casualties. The facade of the building is completely ordinary: a rough concrete box, indistinguishable from the other offices around it. A small disco ball glitters through the blinds of one of the office windows. But behind the façade of the office building lies a huge hangar-like warehouse where collected personal items are photographed, identified and restored.
Perfectly organized on metal shelves throughout the warehouse are the tools needed for the million tasks Kenyon performs on duty. One closet contains all the clothes and such that Jensen needs to process quickly, each item in a labeled zip-lock bag. It has everything you need to provide first aid of any type on the scene, and body armor for when Kenyon is called to hot spots. There's a basket of prayer rugs for Muslim families and a box of teddy bears wearing Kenyon T-shirts for children at Family Help Centers. A refrigerated truck, a mobile morgue, is located in the corner, its door slightly open. There's a coffin wrapped in purple fabric against one wall, which Jensen explains is a "training machine" for the team, but it still looks ominous. A student works at a desk, using Photoshop to place photos of found personal items on a white background to make it easier for families to identify them later. The rain drums on the roof, but otherwise there is grave silence here.
Kenyon has only recently moved into the premises, chosen for its proximity to Heathrow Airport, but Kenyon itself has a rich history. In 1906, Harold and Herbert Kenyon, the sons of an English funeral director, were asked to help identify and bring home the 28 bodies of those killed in a train accident near Salisbury. The Kenyons, as the firm's employees still call themselves, got down to business as soon as they heard the terrible news of a major disaster. At that time they could not yet identify people by DNA. Victims were identified by fingerprints and dental records if they had them, or by personal belongings if they did not. While technology became more and more complex, disasters with mass loss of life became more and more widespread. Air travel became faster and more accessible, and plane crashes claimed more lives. The weapons became more and more powerful. The need for specialists grew and Kenyon became an international company.
Today, most people believe that it is governments who deal with the consequences of large-scale disasters. This is often true: Jensen's extensive experience before joining Kenyon in 1998 was in the U.S. Army handling mortuary affairs. But it's not just the military doing this; companies like Kenyon have their hands full, not only because of their high level of expertise, but also because it can be useful to have a team on hand without political affiliation. In the 2004 tsunami in Thailand, more than 40 countries lost tourists, and each worked to return the bodies of the dead to their families. After the tsunami, bodies are not easily identified, and ethnicity provides little indication of nationality: “I will stand up in Phuket and tell all Swedes to stand up. And no one will answer,” Jensen says. “We all have to work together.” Kenyon provided the equipment and acted as an honest broker, not favoring any nationality over another.
Along with terrorism, Jensen's work often involves plane crashes. Many passengers assume that in the event of a plane crash, the airline takes on many of the associated responsibilities. More often than not, they don't. Airlines and governments keep companies like Kenyon on hand because they can't afford to make a mistake with such a responsibility. In addition to the ethical imperative to do right by the victims' families, there are huge financial losses at stake if the work is done poorly. Years of litigation and waves of overwhelming negativity and claims from disgruntled families can become critical. Malaysia Airlines, for example, has barely dealt with widespread criticism over its responsibility for the MH370 and MH17 tragedies (Malaysia Airlines, Jensen reminded me several times, is not a Kenyon customer). Airlines can outsource everything to Kenyon; their services include organizing call centers, identifying and delivering bodies home, mass graves, and recovering the personal belongings of the dead.
Some of what is expected of an airline in the event of a disaster was written into federal law 20 years ago. Before this, carriers got away with performing their duties rather erratically. Families who succeeded in pushing for stronger federal regulation on the issue lost loved ones after the U.S. Flight 427 disaster. Air when a plane crashed near Pittsburgh in 1994. According to heartbreaking letters from families of victims to the airline, the response of U.S. Air on the crash was unsatisfactory to say the least.
“When it turned out that personal belongings ended up in garbage containers,” writes one of the relatives of the deceased, “this was already enough to infuriate any caring person. Who decides which personal items are important and which go in the trash? After all, we are talking about human lives!! Sometimes the luggage tag is the only thing a person has left!”
Some countries are still lagging behind in resolving such situations. Mary Schiavo, an aviation lawyer and former Department of Transportation inspector general, told me that after one crash in Venezuela, authorities conducted a casual search for remains and then dug up what was left with a backhoe from a nearby farm. “I don't mean to imply that anyone isn't kind or sensitive enough, because there's no question that the people I've worked with over the years have tried to be both kind and sensitive in handling the remains,” Mary Schiavo added. “But sometimes they didn’t have enough experience to pay the attention to detail that the National Transportation Safety Board or professional groups like Kenyon would. More precisely, I mean the Kenyon group." Kenyon is the difference between a perfect response and decades of litigation.
When a commercial flight crashes, the client immediately notifies Jensen. Typically the client is the airline, although in some cases it could be a company like Rio Tinto or even the country where the plane crashed. He collects all the information he can. First he tries to figure out who is responsible for what. Kenyon is a private company, so if the government decides to take over the administration of the cleanup effort, Jensen defers to them while remaining on hand for consultation. In a few minutes on the phone, Jensen learns enough information about the incident to understand what the airline's most pressing needs are. In a matter of hours, Kenyon's workforce could swell from 27 full-time employees to 900 contracted independent contractors, depending on the severity of the disaster. Kenyon team members are not industry specific, although many have law enforcement backgrounds. All have one thing in common: they are very empathic, although they retain the ability to emotionally distance themselves from the victims of the disaster. “You don’t have to get involved,” Jensen reminds them. Jensen prefers not to maintain contact with the families of the victims, considering himself a kind of activator of their grief.
Each employee and team member has their own responsibilities and performs them as needed. In the long hallway of a building in Bracknell hangs a chart showing the course of action during a crisis. There are countless color-coded circles crowded around it, each representing a job that needs to be done. At the very top is a red ball representing the Senior Incident Coordinator - Jensen.
Around the world, crisis communications team members keep their phones nearby, ready to answer questions from the media. At this time, the hotel communications team travels to a hotel located near the crash site. Families of victims from all over the world are flying into the disaster area, so the hotel must be large enough to accommodate them all. Once families and Kenyon staff have arrived, the selected hotel receives a manual by mail or fax on how to select rooms and prepare them for grieving guests. For the next few days, the hotel is being transformed into a Family Assistance Center, where family members of the victims will wait, grieve together and make the best of their time between briefings.
While his plan to establish a Family Assistance Center is being carried out, Jensen is already on his way to the scene. Once Jensen has an idea of the condition of the bodies, he will begin giving instructions about the morgue. For this, it is not so much the number of victims that is important, but the condition of the bodies. The crash of a small plane in Mozambique in 2013, for example, required more effort to organize the collection and storage of bodies than the misfortunes of large commercial flights. Although only 33 passengers died, 900 body fragments were found.
Jensen often has to act as a liaison between the families staying at the hotel and the crew at the crash site. Every high-death disaster is different, but Kenyon employees rarely work alone on the scene of a disaster—even in the case of the Rio Tinto crash in Peru, the government required two Peruvian police officers to join the team. Kenyon works alongside local law enforcement, medical examiners, firefighters and the military. Each of them works quickly to prevent weather conditions from causing further damage to unprotected remains and personal belongings.
Once Jensen learns more details about the disaster, he organizes a meeting for the families of the victims. Such briefings are very difficult. “You can't undo what happened, so the best you can do is not make it worse,” Jensen says grimly. “You have a very difficult task.” Jensen desperately wants to give the families a small glimmer of hope, but instead he must deliver the brutal facts. He first warns families that they are about to hear very specific information. Parents take their children out of the room. “You have to realize that there was a high-speed impact, which means your loved ones now look different from us,” he says something like this. “This means we will likely find several thousand fragments of human remains.” At this moment, suffocation begins. Jensen drained all hope from the room. Now his job is to help people go through transformation.
Once remains and personal effects are collected from the crash site, the Kenyons collect dental and other medical records and conduct lengthy interviews with families, trying to uncover any details that could help identify the victims. Each family must choose one person to receive the remains and personal items found. Some disputes end in court. Kenyon staff explains what procedures are followed with personal items and asks families the necessary questions: Do they want the items found to be cleaned? Do they want to receive them by hand or by mail? Jensen leaves every detail up to the families of the victims. They have little control over the circumstances in which they find themselves, and making decisions about personal belongings gives them back a sense of some kind of control.
Families may also decide not to participate in the process. For some, personal items don't matter. For some, the remains are not important. But almost everyone wants to take part. Hailey Shanks was just four years old when her mother, a flight attendant, died in the 2000 crash of Alaska 261. Her grandmother received her mother's found things - a button from a uniform and a belly button ring - and it would never have occurred to her not to take them. “I think the thought of throwing away any memory of what happened just couldn’t occur to her,” Shanks says. Grandma Shanks keeps them in a small box in her bedroom. Sometimes Shanks takes them for herself, but the trauma associated with them torments her too much. However, she is glad that her grandmother keeps them. “I think she's very worried that she couldn't be there - not in the sense that she wanted to be there - but that her daughter was in that situation. I think any memory of her and what happened is very important in itself. Any piece."
At the crash site, Jensen and his team remove any hazardous substances that could cause further damage to items, but items arrive at Bracknell in varying states. They are wet from the weather and from the water used to put out the fire, and they smell like jet fuel and decomposition. Once the container is delivered, team members carefully unpack each box and place the items on long tables in the middle of the room. The items are examined and divided into two groups: "correlated" - things with the names of passengers on them or things found near or on the body, and "uncorrelated" - which includes everything from a watch found in a pile of debris to a suitcase, marked with a name that is not on the passenger list. Correlated items are returned first, while uncorrelated items are photographed and placed in an online catalog that families of the victims can study in the hope of identifying one of the items.
Before photo catalogs became available online, they were made in paper format, with six or more items on each page. I spend an hour leafing through one of these catalogs left over from a plane crash a decade ago. Whatever the purpose of its creation, the catalog provides an excellent insight into the style and popular culture of the time. There's Jessica Simpson's "Irresistible" CD and a water-stained book by Ian Rankin. Some things are badly damaged. A blackened Lego set and several pages of glasses without lenses and with terribly crooked arms, like from Dali’s paintings. Here are some black boxes with the Chief from South Park on the lid. Here is a page with engraved wedding rings - Patricia, Marisa, Marietta, Laura, Giovanni - and a small airplane pin. Next to each item there is a column where its condition is described, and everywhere there is a “damaged” mark.
As the families of the disaster victims identify what they can from the catalog, Jensen continues to work to match the remaining items with those who died. He works tirelessly. He and his team are using every possible piece of evidence, including camera photos and recovered cell phone numbers. Jensen even brings car keys to dealers to try to get the vehicle identification number. Typically, dealers can only tell you the country in which the car was sold, but even this can be important evidence. For example, Jensen learned that a set of car keys found after the Germanwing plane crash came from a car sold in Spain, greatly narrowing the number of victims to whom they could have belonged.
Identifying personal items can be much more difficult than identifying bodies. “When you examine human remains, you're doing a physical examination,” explains Jensen. “You're talking to the family and asking them questions to gather information and identify the individual—that's not personalization. But when you look into personal things, you can learn everything about a person. For example, what's on his playlist? Of course, your goal isn't to find out what's on their playlist, you're just looking at what's on the computer to try to figure out who it is." The body is the body, but personal belongings are life. It's impossible to distance yourself from the deceased when you're looking through his or her wedding photos from just a few weeks ago.
Jensen has encountered things that, under other circumstances, he would have found personally outrageous. “Just think that all this luggage went through control at the airport. Imagine all these different societies, religions and groups that the people on the plane represent. Their personal lives tell about all this. You take a thing and think: "Oh my God. Who could possibly need this? Why did you need this picture or this book? Why did you support this organization? "" He cares about all these things no less than about others - "You can't get involved" .
Each stage of returning items is a decision that must be made by the family of the deceased. You cannot simply assume that relatives will want to receive cleaned items. Jensen tells the story of one woman who lost her daughter in the Pan Am 103 disaster when the plane exploded over Lockerbie in 1988. At first, when the woman received her daughter's belongings, she was upset that they smelled like fuel. It permeated the entire house. But after some time, the woman began to value it as the last reminder of her daughter. “You shouldn’t deprive anyone of choice, because you might, for example, meet a mother who will say: “I’ve been doing my son’s laundry for 15 years, and I want the person who washes his shirt for the last time to be me.” not you"".
Many of the things Jensen found will never be returned. After two years or however long it takes to complete the search procedure, the lost items collected by Jensen will be destroyed. But the impressions and experiences he received will remain in his memory and will often return to him and help him.
Jensen, for example, knows why you shouldn't put on a life jacket before leaving a sinking plane: he's been to crash sites where he's seen the horrific sight of people floating inside the plane, trapped by their life jackets while how the others survived. He knows that it is useless to spend his whole life afraid of dying during some catastrophe. He thinks about the woman whose body was found in the wreckage of the Oklahoma bombing. She had a high-heeled shoe on one foot and a street shoe on the other. He realized that this woman had just come to the office and was changing her shoes. If she had been five minutes late for work that day, she would have lived.
Like the others, Jensen wonders how he would feel and behave at the very end. “I know which things belonging to my family members I would like to have returned to me. “I know what, I wish Brandon had,” he nods toward his husband, Kenyon CEO Brandon Jones. “The engagement ring, the bracelets (Jones and Jensen are wearing woven bracelets that they gave each other) are special things. He might want to sell them,” he jokes.
Jones thinks for a moment. “It’s strange,” he says, “I’m not afraid to fly. I didn't look at life any differently than I did before Kenyon. But I began to evaluate the importance of things differently. For example, there are things that I always carry with me, they are always in my bag. Souvenirs that he brought me from the places he visited, and which are always with me. Things I may not see on a daily basis, but I certainly always see when I fold up my passport. And laying out his things on the plane, I think that they would mean something to him, that he would keep them if they were returned to him.”
Work has taught Jensen that fear of disaster doesn't help, but he still always counts the exit doors before entering a hotel room, and when traveling by plane, neither he nor Jones ever take off their shoes before passing out. “fasten your seat belts” sign (most accidents happen during takeoff and landing, and you don’t want to end up barefoot on the runway if you have to rush outside). I asked if Jensen had a secret for staying calm in an age of terrorism, and here it is: Allow yourself to worry about everyday worries and don't waste time on the horrors.
Most families prefer to receive personal items by mail, then they are wrapped in white wrapping paper if they are large, or placed in small boxes. Some families want items delivered to them in person. And then it becomes very difficult.
One day, Jensen needed to return the personal belongings of a young man who had died in a plane crash. Early in the morning of the day of the disaster, he called his mother and said that he was boarding a plane. She found out later that day when she turned on the TV and saw that the plane had crashed into the ocean.
But after that, Jensen remembers, she still wasn't sure. Could her son have sailed to the nearest island? Maybe the coast guard will check? They checked, of course. Several days after the disaster, almost all the passengers were identified by DNA samples, but none of the pieces of tissue belonged to her son.
When the passengers' personal belongings washed ashore, fishermen and sheriffs retrieved them. They found several of her son's belongings, including two water-soaked passports (one containing a visa) and a suitcase that appeared to belong to him. The company called his mother and asked if she wanted the items delivered or mailed. She asked someone to bring them, and Jensen volunteered to do it.
Jensen remembers arriving at the woman's house and seeing her son's truck still parked outside the house. His room had not been touched since he left on his journey. The woman left her job and lived in suspended animation. “She couldn't cope,” Jensen recalls. - There was no evidence. There was no body." Jensen and one of his employees cleared the table and covered it with a white cloth. They asked the mother to leave and began unpacking her son's things. They covered them so that the sight of all the things at once would not shock her too much. They asked her to come in.
They showed their mother two passports. She dropped her head into her hands and rocked back and forth. The next item surprised Jensen. When they opened the suitcase, they found a set of orange curlers, like the ones Jensen's mother used in the 70s. The young man had short hair - it was very strange. Jensen suggested that the fisherman found the suitcase half open and put another passenger's item in it. “Please don’t be offended,” he said, taking out curlers.
The woman looked at the curlers. She said they belonged to her son. He borrowed her mother's suitcase, in which she kept her curlers. He knew how much they meant to his grandmother, the woman told Jensen. He didn’t put them anywhere, but simply left them in their place. Jensen remembers the way she looked at him after that: “So, Robert, you're telling me that my son isn't coming home.”
InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.
On July 7, an Air Canada passenger plane flying from Toronto mistakenly headed not onto the runway, but onto the taxiway, where four other airliners were at that moment. The controllers managed to stop the pilot in time, give the command to go around, after which the plane landed safely on the correct runway.
According to the head of Aero Consulting Experts and former United Airlines pilot Ross Eimer, the incident threatened to become the largest disaster in aviation history: “Imagine a huge Airbus crashing into four passenger airliners with full tanks.”
Let's remember the most famous and unusual cases of survival in plane crashes.
- like a person who survived a fall from a maximum height,
- as a person who received the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage - 75 rubles. According to Gosstrakh standards in the USSR, 300 rubles were required. compensation for damages for the dead and 75 rubles. for survivors of plane crashes.
Larisa Savitskaya with her son Georgy. Image: sergiev.ru.
Survive falling from a height of 10 km without a parachute
The DC-9 crash over Hermsdorf was an aircraft accident that occurred on January 26, 1972. The McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 airliner of Yugoslav Airlines was operating flight JAT367 on the route Stockholm - Copenhagen - Zagreb - Belgrade, but 46 minutes after departure from Copenhagen the liner exploded in the air. According to some reports, a Croatian group of extremists left a bomb in the luggage compartment of the airliner.
The explosion of the airliner occurred over the German city of Hermsdorf, and the wreckage of the plane fell near the city of Ceska Kamenice (Czechoslovakia). Of the 28 people on board (23 passengers and 5 crew members), only one survived - 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovich, who fell without a parachute from a height of 10,160 meters. She is the holder of the world altitude record for surviving a free fall without a parachute, according to the Guinness Book of Records.
Vesna was in a coma and received many injuries: fractures of the base of the skull, three vertebrae, both legs and the pelvis. The treatment took 16 months, of which for 10 months the girl’s lower body was paralyzed (from the waist to the legs).
This aircraft accident occurred on January 15, 2009. The US Airways Airbus A320-214 was operating flight AWE 1549 on the route New York-Charlotte-Seattle, and there were 150 passengers and 5 crew members on board. 1.5 minutes after takeoff, the plane collided with a flock of birds and both engines failed. Commander Chesley Sullenberger, a former US Air Force pilot, decided that the only option to save the 155 people on board was to land on the Hudson River. The splashdown turned out to be successful.
The crew landed the plane safely on the waters of the Hudson River in New York. All 155 people on board survived, 83 people were injured - 5 seriously (one flight attendant was the most injured) and 78 minor.
In the media, the incident is known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.” In total, 11 cases of controlled forced landings of passenger airliners on water are known; this case is the fourth without casualties.
By the way, yesterday, July 17, 2017 The Ural Airlines plane (flight U6-2932 Simferopol - Yekaterinburg) collided with a flock of birds, as a result of which the nose cone was damaged. It would seem like such a colossus and some birds, but... the plane ended up being repaired for 12 hours.
Tu-124 landing on the Neva
This splashdown event occurred in Soviet aviation in the skies over Leningrad on August 21, 1963. As a result of a combination of circumstances, the engines of the Tu-124 passenger plane failed, and the airliner began gliding from a height of half a kilometer above the city center. The crew had no choice but to try to splash down on the surface of the Neva. All 52 people on board survived.
Initially, the commission investigating the circumstances of the accident placed responsibility for the emergency on the crew. But later it was decided not to punish the pilots.