Il-18 Crash Site near Sverdlovsk

The crash site of the Il-18V registered CCCP-75538 lies on the eastern outskirts of Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk), next to Koltsovo Airport in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Russia. On 16 November 1967 a passenger airliner went down here shortly after take-off, killing all 107 people on board. At the time it was the deadliest air disaster in the USSR and the worst of all Il-18 accidents.

The 1967 Il-18 crash

The aircraft was operating flight 2230 from Sverdlovsk to Tashkent. That evening the airport was under a solid layer of stratus cloud with a base at 150–170 metres, and visibility was 6 kilometres. The Il-18V took off on a magnetic heading of 76°, and at 21:02:40 local time the crew reported the take-off to the controller.

At a height of 140–150 metres the aircraft suddenly turned right and began a rapid descent. It struck the ground at about 440 km/h with a vertical speed of about 20 m/s, broke up and caught fire. The wreckage was spread over a strip 320 metres long on a ploughed field roughly 5.3 km from the start of the take-off run, with part of it lying on a dirt road.

There were 99 passengers on board, 87 adults and 12 children, and 8 crew members. Nobody survived.

Possible causes

The exact cause was never established because the aircraft's components were completely destroyed. The investigation considered two main versions:

• a failure in the control system of engine No. 4, which could have produced negative thrust;
• a failure of the Put-1M flight director system, giving the crew false attitude indicator readings.

The commission noted that either fault could have led to the crash only in combination with other adverse factors: night, low cloud and low altitude left the crew very little time.

Memory

The passengers were buried at the Siberian Cemetery in Sverdlovsk, and the crew at the cemetery in the settlement of Koltsovo. The impact site itself is a farm field outside the airfield.

Getting there

The Il-18 crash site is in the Koltsovo Airport area on the edge of Yekaterinburg, about 5 km from the start of the runway. The point is marked on this place's map. The airfield itself is closed to the public.