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In the Bolkhovitinov Design Bureau and KOSTR
sion and ordered the obstinate military rep to open the lower emergency hatch
and, at his command, jump and parachute to safety. Up till then, no one had any
experience parachuting from an SB. The unfortunate military rep was badly
injured when he jumped out of the airplane and broke his leg upon landing.
Relieved of his passenger, the pilot maneuvered over the airfield as though to help
lower the landing gear.When he had made sure that the ambulance had reached
the parachute of the military rep, he lowered the landing gear and safely landed.
The military rep was laid up in the hospital for about three months.The handover
of the airplanes proceeded without delay.
At first, only a few individuals knew that the landing gear had actually been fully
operational. A third crew member—the flight mechanic, who sat in the center
wing section in the gunner/radio operator’s seat—confirmed that during attempts
to lower the landing gear the electric motor of the hydraulic pump was humming
loudly. Several more witnesses appeared at LIS saying that this was not the first time
the electric motor had hummed, even without a command to lower the landing
gear.The pilot who had ejected the military rep suggested,“Let an electrician fly
and figure out what’s going on there.”
To establish the truth, Tarasevich suggested that I fly. I prepared cables and
instruments, and with the help of factory electricians we installed everything in the
rear gunner/radio operator cockpit. Before the flight, the pilot was obviously
disappointed that I could not be confined in the forward navigator’s cockpit.The
flight mechanic refused to fly in the forward cockpit. He justified this by saying
that the designer would mess up somehow and the landing gear wouldn’t extend,
and he had no desire to parachute out of a high-speed aircraft, all the more so since
he had never even jumped from a tower.
We flew without a flight mechanic. During the flight, I did not find any
malfunctions or humming. However, the pilot was in no hurry to land and proved
to me that flying on an SB was “all fear and no fun.” After landing, Godovikov,
with whom I was on good terms, disclosed to me the cause of the landing gear
“failure.”“Thank God, the military rep survived, but his nitpicking was making our
life impossible. You think up something to tell Tarasevich.” Godovikov was the
kindest person. He was really upset when he found out about the escapades of the
LIS flight mechanics after the military rep had already been dispatched to the
hospital. Katya, who was working as a foreman in quality control, was subordinate
to Godovikov.“I can’t imagine a better boss than Nikolay Nikolayevich,” she used
to say. In my report to Tarasevich, I said that everything was fully operational and
that we had been unable to reproduce the incident that occurred previously.
Evidently it was a very rare instance of a foreign particle getting under the electric
motor’s switching contacts.
after our intense work, Katya and I spent our days off and two evenings a
week at the Wings of the Soviets boathouse near the Borodinskiy Bridge. Katya
once again took her place as stroke sweeping in a four. Rowing proved to be a very
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