At the end of the indian summer - October 15th, 1970 from the border city of Batumi by flight N244 to Sukhumi and further to Krasnodar, an Aeroflot An-24 aircraft took off. It carried 46 passengers, including 17 women and one child. People who had rested in the Caucasus couldn’t have known that during the next day they would have eye-witnessed the tragedy carried out with the first hijacked aircraft in the USSR.

The flight to Sukhumi airport was supposed to last 30-35 minutes. Five minutes after takeoff, at 12:40 local time, two passengers in the first row - Pranas Brazinskas (45 years old) and his son Algirdas Brazinskas - called the 19-year-old flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko and demanded to give the pilots an envelope with a note.

ORDER No. 9

1. I order to fly to the indicated number.

2. Cut off radio communication.

3. For failure to comply with the order - Death.

(Free Europe) P.K.Z.

General (Krylov)

Suspecting something was wrong with the passengers' request, Nadezhda nevertheless coped with emotions and headed to the cockpit. Following her, the terrorist, who had already managed to get a sawn-off shotgun from his bag, moved towards the pilot's cabin. During those days, the pilots weren’t fenced off from passengers by a reinforced door, and there was access to the cockpit.

Seeing the gun, Kurchenko turned to face the bandit to block the path and shouted to the pilots: “We are under attack! They are armed!” These words were the last words in her life. Struck by the determination and resistance of Nadezhda, the terrorist, without thinking for a second, shot twice at the brave flight attendant. One of the bullets was fatal.

Nadezhda Kurchenko was born on December 29th, 1950 in the village of Novopoltava, Klyuchevsky District, Altai Territory. She graduated from a children's community school in the village of Ponino, Glazovsky District, Udmurt ASSR. In December 1968, Nadya moved to Sukhumi, where she began working as a flight attendant for a local airline. Young Nadezhda Kurchenko did not live two and a half months before her twenties and three months before her wedding.

Seeing the bandit rushing to the cockpit and hearing the first shots, several people instantly unfastened their belts and jumped out of their seats. But they did not have time to take a step: the second terrorist, the young Brazinskas, also pulled out a sawn-off shotgun and fired along the cabin. The bullet whizzed over the heads of the shocked passengers.

“Nobody gets up! - He shouted. - Otherwise we will blow up the plane!”

The commander of the aircraft immediately began to sharply manoeuvre - directing the plane down and up, trying to knock the terrorists off their feet. However, this did not help, the invaders opened fire shouting: “Turkey! Turkey!"

The young bandit fired again. The bullet pierced the fuselage skin and exited through. After the second shot, he opened his grey cloak, and the passengers saw grenades tied to his belt.

"This is for you! - shouted Brazinskas Jr. - If anyone else gets up, we will blow up the plane!"

It became clear that this was not an empty threat - in case of failure, they already had nothing to lose. To take the plane under full control, the terrorists began shooting at the cockpit. Commander Georgy Chakhrakia was shot to the spine, navigator Valery Fadeev and flight mechanic Hovhannes Babayan were wounded to the chest. After being wounded, the commander fell on the steering wheel with his chest and the plane began to dive. The disaster was avoided with great difficulty.

“I lost my legs. Through efforts, I turned around and saw a terrible picture, Nadia was lying motionless on the floor in the door of our cabin and was bleeding. Navigator Fadeev was lying nearby. And behind us stood a man and, shaking a grenade, shouted: “Keep the seashore on the left! Heading south! Do not enter the clouds! Obey, otherwise we will blow up the plane!” - said the commander of the captured An-24 Georgy Chakhrakia.

Only the co-pilot Suliko Shavidze, as they say, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The bullet that was intended for him hit the steel arm of the back of the chair.

The terrorists weren’t beating around the bush - they tore off the radio communication headphones from the pilots and stomped on the lying bodies. When navigator Valery Fadeev came to his senses (his lungs were shot), the bandit cursed and kicked the seriously wounded man.

Along the way, the terrorists fired at the passengers - they were afraid that someone would try to neutralise them. Later, when examining the aircraft, about 24 bullet holes were found in its fuselage. The bandits fired so intensely that some of the passengers were convinced that the criminals were armed with machine guns.

The An-24 crew faced a difficult choice - to submit to the demands of the invaders or to continue the resistance. The commander of the An-24 was even considering a radical option: “I had thoughts: to give up the steering wheel and throw the plane into the sea. To perish, but to pull along these beasts standing behind you. "

However, there were innocent passengers in the cabin. Chakhrakia then said to Shavidze: “If I lose consciousness, navigate the plane at the request of the bandits and land it. We must save the plane and passengers!"

The pilots even tried to outwit the bandits and land the plane on the territory of a military airfield in Kobuleti (USSR). But Brazinskas Sr. understood everything and warned that he would blow up the aircraft. No more attempts were made to deceive the terrorists. An-24 crossed the Soviet border and landed at the airport in Trabzon (Turkey).

“We made a circle and fired green rockets, making it clear to clear the strip. We entered from the side of the mountains and landed appropriately for the case, if something happened, we would land on the sea,” - the commander of An-24 recalled.

Shortly before that, Shavidze pressed a secret button, sending a signal to the dispatcher to hijack the plane - Turkish police officers were already waiting on the runway. During the arrest, the Brazinskas did not show any resistance - and voluntarily surrendering their weapons, they went to the police station.

The Turkish authorities did not extradite the terrorists to the Soviet Union. Despite the hijacking, murder and extreme cruelty, Brazinskas, the father, was sentenced to eight years in prison, and the son - to two. However, two years later, both bandits were decriminalised and managed to get over to the United States. In America, they changed their first and last names to Frank and Albert White and settled in the town of Santa Monica in California. Brazinskas Sr. first worked as a painter, and then became a co-owner of an arms store. His son graduated from accounting courses, got a job at an insurance company and married an American woman. The Brazinskas even wrote their own book about the hijacking, and on the 30th anniversary of the An-24 tragedy they sent an essay to Lithuanian newspapers, where they boasted of their «heroic achievement". However, the relationship between father and son did not work out. Over the years, Brazinskas Sr. became more and more irritable and began drinking - he was haunted by the paranoid fear that KGB agents were following him to steal him back to the USSR. As a result, during one of the quarrels, 45-year-old Algirdas Brazinskas beat his 77-year-old father with sports dumbbells to death. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

The wounded members of the An-24 crew were sent to the hospital, and the passengers were taken home by a military helicopter the next day. A little later, the hijacked An-24 was also overtaken.

The coffin with the body of Nadezhda Kurchenko was delivered to the USSR as well. The girl was buried with honours in the city Komsomol park in the center of Sukhumi. Thousands of townspeople followed the coffin along the streets of the city and carried flowers, and the planes leaving for flights flapped their wings as a sign of memory and admiration for the feat of their young colleague. In Sukhumi, a city park was named in honour of Nadezhda Kurchenko, in which a monument to a brave flight attendant was erected.

Nadezhda Kurchenko was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Twenty years after the tragic events, at the request of the mother, the remains of Nadezhda were transported to the cemetery in the hometown of Glazov. In the school of young pilots in the capital of the republic - Izhevsk, a museum named after her was opened, which was awarded the title of "national".

The tragedy that has occurred has become not only a shock for the whole country, but also a serious warning. Soon after air tickets were sold using passports, airports began inspecting the luggage of passengers, pilots and flight attendants were instructed how to behave when an aircraft was being hijacked - for some time the pilots were even armed with Makarov pistols. Also, reinforced cockpit doors with peepholes were installed on the planes and ordered to keep them closed throughout the flight.

The successful hijacking and the incommensurability of the punishment of the bandits for what they did could become a bad example to follow. Therefore, since 1971, all flights of passenger aircraft that took place near the borders of the USSR were accompanied by police officers in civilian clothes, whose duty was to prevent the hijacking of the aircraft abroad at any cost. And in 1972, the USSR ratified the Hague Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft.

p.s. In the process of writing this article, we have collected a lot of material about the tragedy that happened 50 years ago. Among others was a photograph of the Brazinskas father and son. And we couldn’t publish the faces of these self-righteous non-humans who escaped fair punishment, next to a photograph of a young brave girl who gave her life to the crew. The blessed memory of Nadezhda Kurchenko and our contempt for the terrorist, no matter what idea they cover up for their atrocities!