At 3:48 in the afternoon on 20 October 1986, two minutes from touchdown at Kuibyshev, the captain of a Soviet airliner asked his flight engineer to pull the curtains across the cockpit windows. The Tupolev Tu-134 had them fitted for training: draw them, and the pilot can see instruments and nothing else.

Flight 6502 was not a training flight. There were 87 passengers behind the door, among them fourteen children. Captain Alexander Kliuyev had told his first officer he could land the aircraft blind, and now he was going to prove it.

The bet

Air traffic control had offered Flight 6502 a straightforward NDB approach into Kurumoch Airport. Kliuyev, 29 years into a system that prized bravado, wanted to do it on instruments alone, with the windows covered. He had wagered as much with First Officer Gennady Zhirnov.

Blind flying is a real and necessary skill, drilled into every airline pilot. The curtains exist precisely so that it can be practised. What made this different was that the aeroplane was full of fare-paying passengers, the weather did not require it, and nobody on the flight deck stopped him. Several crew members watched the curtains close. None intervened.

Ninety seconds

Behind the curtain, Kliuyev misjudged two things at once: how high he was, and how fast he was coming down. The ground-proximity warning sounded at somewhere between 62 and 65 metres — barely 200 feet. The correct response, the only response, was to go around. He did not.

The Tu-134 hit the runway hard, at around 150 knots. The landing gear took a load it was never built to absorb and collapsed. The aircraft slewed off the end of the runway, rolled over and caught fire.

Twenty-four people got out. One of them was Kliuyev.

The man in the right-hand seat

Gennady Zhirnov survived the impact. What he did next is the part of this story that deserves to outlast the bet. He went back into the burning aircraft to get passengers out, took in a great deal of smoke doing it, and suffered cardiac arrest on the way to hospital. He did not survive.

That fourteen children walked away from an inverted, burning airliner is the one piece of grace in the whole account.

The cover-up, and the reckoning

Investigators found no mechanical reason for any of it. The flight recordings, and reportedly an admission from Kliuyev himself, pointed to the dare; Western outlets including the Los Angeles Times reported it that way in 1987. Kliuyev later retracted, blaming a fuel leak and engine failure instead. No evidence supported him.

The Soviet authorities tried to keep the details buried, and largely succeeded for years. The story reached the public in good part because a firefighter who had been at the scene kept his photographs and eventually released them.

Kliuyev was charged with violating transportation and flight safety rules and sentenced by the Supreme Court of the Russian SFSR to 15 years. He served six.

Aviation safety culture has spent the four decades since building the thing that was missing from that cockpit: the expectation that any crew member can stop the captain. Flight 6502 is not really a story about a bad landing. It is a story about a flight deck where three people watched a man cover the windows, and nobody said no.

The Tu-134 itself was a capable and much-loved machine, and it deserves better than to be remembered only for this. The footage above shows one working normally.

Sources: Wikipedia, Aviation Safety Network, All That’s Interesting, Simple Flying, and AvGeekery.