On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody.

A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast off, came alongside the sinking airliner, got a line onto the captain’s control wheel and dragged it to the bank with all fifty-two people still sitting inside it.

The Soviet authorities said nothing about any of it. Leningraders knew it as a rumour for thirty-five years.

One Bolt

The aircraft was seventeen months old. Shortly after take-off from Tallinn there was a loud bang during gear retraction and the nose leg jammed part-retracted. Flight International, reporting the Soviet findings a year later, put it plainly: subsequent examination revealed a sheared bolt in the mechanism.

Going back to Tallinn was out because fog was closing in there. Air traffic control sent them to Leningrad instead, to belly-land on the unpaved emergency strip with fire appliances and ambulances standing by.

They arrived over the city around eleven and began to circle. They flew low deliberately — partly so that the dangling gear would not rupture the fuselage through decompression, partly to burn fuel faster.

Almost every published figure for what happened next is contested, and it is worth being straight about that. The altitude is given variously as 450, 500 and 600 metres. The crew flew eight circuits according to Flight International and both Wikipedias, and sixteen according to a 1999 television programme on which the surviving crew appeared. The fuel remaining when the first engine quit is quoted as 750 litres, as 1,300 kilograms, and as two and a half tonnes.

Meanwhile the crew were trying to force the nose leg down with a pole through a hole they had cut in the cockpit floor. They also moved the heavy baggage aft to shift the centre of gravity back and reduce the load on a nosewheel they were not confident about.

Fourteen Seconds

At 12:10, on the eighth circuit and about twenty-one kilometres from the airport, the port engine flamed out. Fuel starvation — though, as Flight International noted, the contents gauges still showed some remaining.

The starboard engine stopped while the aircraft was over the city, turning onto an immediate approach. Mostovoy sent everyone except his co-pilot aft.

Vasily Chechenev, the co-pilot, was a former naval aviator, and Mostovoy handed him the aircraft for the ditching.

Okhtinsky is the Bolsheokhtinsky, and that 1964 line is the contemporaneous Western corroboration of the whole geography. The Russian accounts add that the aircraft passed about four metres above the Alexander Nevsky Bridge, then under construction, and that workmen tumbled off the scaffolding in terror.

One widely quoted figure should be treated carefully: the “thirty metres” of clearance over the Bolsheokhtinsky appears in no primary source and is flagged as uncited on Wikipedia. The four metres over the Alexander Nevsky is much better attested.

The Tug

Yuri Porshin was taking a timber raft up the river. He cast it off and came alongside.

How the cockpit glazing came out is disputed in a way that tells you something about how the story has been told. The 1964 Flight International account says the tug damaged the windscreen while taking the aircraft in tow, and water started to come in. The Russian accounts, including the 1998 newspaper investigation that first opened the whole thing up, say the glass was broken deliberately so a cable could be tied to the pilots’ control wheels.

Either way, a river tug towed a flooding jet airliner to the bank with fifty-two people aboard.

Whether they got out through the rear door or a roof hatch is also contested. Flight International says the rear door, with the aircraft towed against the bank between two rafts of floating lumber near the Severny Press factory. Russian eyewitness accounts say an upper hatch.

The 1964 assessment of what made it remarkable has not been improved on.

The aircraft was not saved. Pumping could not keep up with water coming in through the hull, and CCCP-45021 sank overnight. It was raised on pontoons on 23 August, written off, and sent dismantled to an aviation school in Tambov Oblast as a ground trainer. It was scrapped in 1970.

The History Guy’s English-language account of the ditching.

Heroes, or Idiots?

Here is where the story stops being comfortable.

The investigating commission initially blamed the crew. Two failures had combined: a sheared bolt in the nose-gear mechanism, which was an engineering problem, and running two engines dry while holding, which was not. The charges were dropped and nobody was punished.

Whether Mostovoy was decorated is disputed in the most human way possible. A 1998 newspaper account said he received the Order of the Red Star. His widow told Izvestia in 2009 that the crew were recommended for it and the decree was never signed. The headline was her own sentence.

What Mostovoy and the navigator did get were two-room flats from Aeroflot’s management.

And not everyone in Soviet aviation thought they deserved even that. Anatoly Orkin, an Honoured Pilot of the USSR and a professor at the Academy of Civil Aviation, told the same 1998 investigation that in his view Mostovoy and his crew should have been severely punished for slovenliness rather than decorated.

He has a point, and the fair verdict is probably that both things are true. The emergency was self-inflicted from the moment the fuel was mismanaged. The recovery from it — a dead-stick jet airliner threaded between two bridges onto a three-hundred-metre-wide river in the middle of a city, tail-down, at the first attempt — is about as good as flying gets.

A Russian-language reconstruction, and by some distance the most-watched account of the incident anywhere.

The Aftermath Nobody Saw

Mostovoy flew with the 200th air detachment until 1978, then supervised shifts at Vnukovo until a heart attack ended that in 1988. He emigrated to Israel with his family in 1989 and died in Kiryat Gat in 1997, aged 64, having spent his last working years as a factory labourer. Chechenev was promoted to captain and then instructor-captain shortly after the ditching.

Air traffic over Leningrad was restricted afterwards. Aircraft had previously been permitted over the city at around four hundred metres; from then on they had to route outside the city limits.

And the incident was simply never reported. It took the 1998 investigation by the newspaper Petrovsky Kurier, which drew responses from a hundred and forty eyewitnesses, to assemble the account most people now know — including the detail that the tug was built in 1898, which rests on that one article alone and which nobody has been able to confirm since.

The 1999 episode of the Russian programme Kak eto bylo, on which the surviving crew told it themselves.

Sources: “Prepare to Ditch”, Flight International, 13 August 1964; Vladimir Fyodorov, Petrovsky Kurier, October–November 1998; Izvestia, 30 January 2009; Kak eto bylo, ViD, 20 February 1999; russianplanes.net; Russian Wikipedia.