The Incredible Story Of Larisa Savitskaya
...The rescue team for several days collected wreckage of aircraft and the pieces of victim bodies. They are used to terrible pictures of pieces of torn flesh therefore the rescue leader was very pleased to find one seat with a whole dead human body in it. But after a few seconds, it became really scary: the “body” suddenly slapped himself on the face killing the mosquito. It took some time for the confused members of the search group to realize that in front of them was a living crash survivor. After the fall from 5000 meters without a parachute the girl was alive. When their first shock passed, they lifted Larisa in their arms to take to evacuate. At the hospital doctors determined that Larisa Savitskaya’s spinal cord is broken in five places, and her arm and ribs are broken, she suffered a concussion and lost almost all her teeth. Doctors told her that graves have already been prepared for everyone including for her.
The Incredible Story Of Larisa Savitskaya
1.The Wedding.
In 1981, a 20-year-old student at the University of Education Larisa Andreеva married 19-year-old medical student Vladimir Savitsky in the city of Blagoveshensk in Russia. Due to the university exams, the “honeymoon” was postponed to August. This young couple was only 20 years old when the tragedy happened. And their happiness lasted only until the end of their honeymoon:
During the honeymoon spouses visited Larisa’s family in Vladivostok and Vladimir’s parents in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. It's time to return to Blagoveshensk, where a young students have studied. Strangely, that despite the difficulty to get tickets during the high summer season on that flight, the plane was almost empty. Before departure the flight was delayed for four hours due to difficult weather conditions. Their reserved seats were in the front, but before departure Larisa felt that it would be better to relocate to the tail. Sitting at the window, the girl fell asleep almost immediately. The awakening was scary. The girl woke up from a strong blow. The temperature immediately dropped from +25 degrees to -30 degrees Celsius. The skin was burning. Around were the cries of passengers, howling, it suddenly became very cold. Larisa turned to her husband, and saw that his face was covered in blood. From the position of his body, his unnatural gaze, she realized that Vladimir was no more. She recalled that instead of the fear and panic came the indifference. I wanted that everything will end quickly and without pain. She thought about a scene from the Italian movie “Miracles Still Happen” where "a girl landed in a jungle still in her seat, so I thought it was better to sit down to soften the shock of the landing. " said Larisa. The movie she referred is a 1974 film by Giuseppe Maria Scotese documenting the true story of Juliane Koepcke, who survived a 10,000-foot-fall after LANSA flight 508 was struck by lightning and disintegrated over the Peruvian jungle in 1971. All 91 other passengers and crew were killed, but Juliane survived after her row of seats acted like a crude helicopter and slowed her fall, such that she was not severely injured on impact with the ground. (Some other passengers also survived the fall for similar reasons, but were too badly hurt to move, and subsequently died.) Finding herself alone in the Amazon, she wandered through the jungle for 10 days, until she was rescued after stumbling across a logging camp. Suddenly faced with the same situation she had seen in “Miracles Still Happen,” Larisa Savitskaya decided that she would try to learn from the experience of Juliane Koepcke.
Photo: This tragedy starts with a love story. Vladimir and Larisa Savitsky got married in 1981. In 1981, the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon.They are both 20 years old and seem to have a wonderful future ahead of them.
2. Like in the Movies
Plane crashes leave no survivors. Well, almost no survivors. During the explosion of An-24, Larisa recalled the film “Miracles Still Happen,” where the girl survived a plane crash. The movie that she and her husband watched two days before the crash becames her manual for surviving. During the explosion Larisa was thrown out of the chair but managed to climb back into it despite her badly injured arm. She clung to the armrests, cringed and planned to die without suffering.
“Most important of all was one scene, where the heroine survived a plane crash while strapped into her seat. Somehow I got to a seat. I didn’t even think of buckling up; action preceded conscious thought. I started to watch through the window, in order to “catch” the ground. I needed to anticipate the impact in time. I’d given up any hope of survival; I just wanted to die painlessly. There was a very thin layer of clouds, then a flash of green, and boom! I landed in the taiga, on top of a birch tree—lucky again! I had a concussion, my spine was damaged in five places, and I had fractured hands, ribs, and feet. Almost all my teeth were knocked out.
The part of plane where Larisa was sitting headed to the ground not straight but slightly swinging in the air like a pendulum. Experts say that this downfall took 8 minutes. By some miracle it was smoothly swinging so the decline was slower than you might expect and the landing was softer. When a ground hit followed Larisa lost consciousness.
3. Three Days Alone in the Woods
She got awake after a few hours in the forest. The fall was softened by birches, along which an An-24 fragment with a girl slided down. Larisa tried to call other passengers hoping that someone else had survived, but the answer was a silence. Nearby was her husband's body. "I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw my husband's body. He was lying in front of me, 3-4m away. It felt like he wanted to see me one last time, like he was saying goodbye to me" - she said. . Rain washed his face from the blood uncover a terrible wound. Larisa covered his face with a blanket.
Larisa still remembers the horror of the scene and of the pain she felt. She was injured but managed to make a shelter with the wreckage roof over her chair, which protected from rain. The hope for a quick rescue was futile because the collision occurred far from the human civilization. In order not to freeze, Larisa collected chair covers and wrapped herself in. Larisa eat blackbarries that have grown in abundance around there and sausages from somebody's baggage. Later the rescue team discovered another woman that also landed alive but without immediate help died from injuries in the second day after the crash. The rain ended on the third day when Larisa saw helicopters. She waved her hand, trying to give a signal but the helicopter pilots mistook her for a local geologist - no one believed in the surviving passengers.
Photo: АN-24. On August 24, the couple boarded flight 811 at Komsomolsk-on-Amur Airport. As the plane takes off, Larisa and Vladimir are far from imagining that this is the end on all their dreams.
Photo: Everyone on it died. Everyone, except Larisa. Larisa Savitskaya was returning from her honeymoon with her husband Vladimir when the Aeroloft AN-24 plane they were flying in collided with a military jet on Aug. 24, 1981.
4. Why Did the Plane Crash? Military Mistake
The cause of the plane crash was a collision with a Tu-16 Military Jet. At 16:21, one of the Tupolev Tu-16k bombers crashed headlong into Aeroflot flight 811. In all likelihood, neither crew ever saw the other, even though they were flying in clear conditions. The impact was incredibly brutal. Both wings were ripped off of the An-24 while the Tu-16k broke in half and caught fire. As it plunged to the ground, the ruined An-24 split into several more pieces, spewing debris and passengers into the summer sky.
What happened to the An-24 passenger plane, which operated a flight on the route Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Blagoveshchensk on August 24, 1981, will be officially announced only after many years. Due to the involvement of Military JET Tu-16K the information about the accident was censored and has not became public after the crash. On this day, a local flight root of the airline had to be crossed by the military aircraft several times. Everything was preplanned and supposed to go smoothly but the bomber Tu-16K, flying from the Zavitinsk military airfield was not informed about passenger liners on the flight route. As a result, the pilots reported the recruitment of a new level earlier than this actually happened. The An-24 crew, in turn, slightly deviated from its flight corridor. The most significant mistakes was the lack of sufficient interaction between military and civilian air traffic controllers (ATC) .
“I think the military ATC was at fault for the crash. They approved a flight path without verifying it with the civilian controllers. But I only learned about this two years ago. The official investigation came to the conclusion that both crews were responsible”. - Larisa said.
“The planes collided tangentially. The wings of the An-24 were ripped off together with the fuel tanks and the roof. For a few very long seconds the plane turned into something like a boat. At that moment I had been sleeping. I remember a terrifying impact, and a burning sensation—the temperature immediately dropped from 25˚C to -30. There were terrible screams, and the whistle of the wind. My husband died immediately—in that moment, life ended for me. I didn’t even cry. Due to the grief, I couldn’t feel fear.”- Larisa recalled later.- “The ‘boat’ then broke into two pieces. The tear passed right in front of our seats. I turned out to be in the tail section. I was thrown into the aisle and straight back to the bulkhead. At first I lost consciousness, then as I came back to myself, I thought not about a death, but about pain. I didn’t want the fall to be painful. And then I remembered an Italian film called ‘Miracles Still Happen.’”
5. Catwoman?
“Investigators later concluded that the piece of the plane in which I fell was shaped like a leaf, and a leaf either falls around the circumference, or from side to side like a swing. This depends on its shape. I don’t know how my piece of the plane was shaped. One scientist by the name of Gorbovsky considered my case alongside those of children and cats that have the ability to fall from great heights without dying. By the laws of physics, the force of the impact depends on one’s weight, the height of the fall, and the amount of air resistance. He concluded that in my case, and with cats and children, some of these quantities don’t follow the laws of physics, and that in stressful situations a mechanism is activated that blocks the force of gravity. I don’t know if he’s right, but I like the comparison with cats.
Photo: Tu-16K strategic bomber. As they fly at an altitude of 5220 meters, a Tupolev Tu-16 (a military aircraft) comes into collision with their plane. The military jet was so rapid that the collision was inevitable. On board the An-24 were 27 passengers and 5 crew members, on board the bomber Tu-16 there were 6 crew members. Of the 38 people 37 were dead.
The map of the Amour region where the city of Blagoveshenst situated is in red color.
6. The Censorship
Despite a censorship the news about her surviving was first published in the USSR in 1985 in the popular magazine ‘Soviet Sport.’ “Apparently they really wanted to write about it. But it was forbidden to mention the plane crash therefore the journalist wrote that I, like a female Icarus, flew on a homemade flying piece, fell from a height of 5 kilometers and survived because a Soviet citizens are able to survive everything.” - said Larisa. Larisa spent three days in the Siberian forest looking for help. As the hours went by, the hope of finding someone, has vanished. The raining weather, clouded skies, dense forest, wild animals, swampy terrain impeded the search. The rescue team also experienced the nausea, diarrhea and stomach ache from the awful look of all mutilated dead bodies of crash victims they had to collect.
“When the rescuers found me, they couldn’t say anything except “Muu-, muu…” I understand their confusion, for three days they’d been collecting pieces of corpses out of the trees, and suddenly they saw a living person. And I kind of looked like a dead person. I was entirely coloured like a prune with a silver shimmer—the paint from the fuselage was extremely annoying; mother of god, I was picking it out of my hair for a month! And because of the wind, my hair had turned into something like a big lump of steel wool.”- recalled Larisa, “Then, in Zavitinsk, I learned that they already dug a grave for me.”
Photo: Larisa with her husband before the flight. . Most of the passengers died instantly. ”At the moment of the crash we immediately lost the roof and the wings,” she later said. “There were screams. I turned to my husband and saw that he was dead. At that moment, I was sure I was about to die as well." But, against the law of physics, Larisa Savitskaya survived the crash. And even more remarkably, she remembered the whole thing from beginning to end.
7. The Life After the Crash.
She didn't get any disability allowance. She didn't have a life insurance. Doctors shrugged - in total she was seriously injured , but separately all her wounds were harmless. The collection of minor injuries couldn't provide her with a disability percentage sufficient to get the disability allowance, according to the state regulations. So she has got only 20$ as a compensation for the plane crash survivors from the state insurance company, placing her in the Guinness World Record Book as receiver of “the smallest compensation of the body harm”. The life of Larisa Savitskaya turned into the struggling with the bureaucracy and followed by other tragic events.
Photo: Larisa with her child. USSR. 1989
Despite the pain in the spine, a year later she finished her university study and got a degree. Contrary to the advice of doctors, Larisa gave a birth to the son. Then she survived another tragedy - her mother died in a car accident.
Today Larisa lives in Moscow region and works a real estate agent. “Five years after the crash my child was born. After finishing my university I worked as a teacher. Then in 1990s when my son got sick, I managed to survive from any temporary job I could find. I worked as a typist, sold books . Later I started my company for selling shoes. Then I worked as a representative of mineral water company “Borjomi”. Then I was paralyzed that was the result of my traumatic brain injury. Then I got recovered. Now I work as an office manager in a real estate company. After work I try to go straight home because my spine is very tired. I’m in the Russian Guiness Book of Records twice: as a crash survivor and as a receiver of the smallest compensation ever received for bodily harm - one single payment of 75 rubles “ [75 rubles was a half of average salary of the nurse in 1980s] - said Larisa in the interview fot “Izvestia” newspaper in 2002
8.It's not scary to fly
Surprisingly, she was never afraid to fly a plane.
“ I live as I lived before. I didn’t have any sort of spiritual awakening as a result of this experience. I didn’t turn to religion, or drunkenness, or depression. I love life. But sometimes I say half seriously and half-jokingly that I am ‘God’s favourite little girl.’ Because he only sends such experiences to his favourite creatures.” said Larisa. "Every August 24, I celebrate my second birthday. I have the impression that there is always a part of me in the sky, that it still has not landed and not ready to do it yet. ".
Photo: Larisa, the sole survivor of this tragedy, suffered long from her injuries. But after a few years, she managed to get past it and even gave birth to a child. Looking at these photos, taken recently, years after the crash, it is hard to imagine all this magnificent woman has suffered.
The whole life of survivors is the unbelievable experience that we must learn and appreciate they didn't give up in the hopeless situation to provide us with the opportunity to learn from them. To survive is very important not only because it prolong the life but because the humanity can learn the important lesson. Рeople often complain and even got depressed because of minor things as: they lose a job, they broke up with their boyfriend, they don't have a money to buy a new shoes or new car. I suggest to all these chronically upset complainers imagine that they are falling from the height of 5000 kilometers in the middle of nowhere, losing the beloved family members and in addition must survive the wilderness. Just imagine! Often people do not appreciate of what they have and realise the real value only when they lose it.
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