1st Man in Space Died in Puzzling ’68 Plane Crash : Soviets End Mystery of Gagarin’s Death

Ending 20 years of speculation of a cover-up, the Communist Party daily newspaper Pravda today admitted that faulty information on cloud cover from a control tower and unexpected air turbulence from another jet fighter were to blame for the plane crash that killed the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, almost 20 years ago.

Gagarin, whose ashes are buried in the Kremlin wall, became an international hero after his April 12, 1961, space flight of 108 minutes--the first by man. But mystery and hints of a cover-up have always clouded his death at the age of 34.

Full information about the exact circumstances and causes of the fatal crash of Gagarin’s MIG-15 jet fighter during a routine training flight March 27, 1968, had never been made public, leading to speculation of a cover-up. Speculation ranged from faulty equipment to rumors the playboy cosmonaut may have been drunk during the flight.

Today’s Pravda story finally pinpointed the causes of the crash saying Gagarin’s aircraft was forced into a nose-dive by a “jet wash” from another aircraft that never saw Gagarin’s plane.

But the hero cosmonaut might have survived if he had been given proper information on the altitude of surrounding cloud cover by a military control tower near Moscow, Pravda said.

“The pilots mistakenly considered that they had a sufficient reserve of height to pull out of the dive. They came out of the clouds at 1,800 feet diving at a 70- to 90-degree angle. They could not parachute. The crew’s actions were quite correct but they lacked only two seconds or 250 meters to pull out of the dive,” Pravda said.

The article, based on the government commission’s findings, was written by Prof. Sergei Belotserkovskiy, a scientist and engineer.

Gagarin’s first and only space flight beat American Alan Shepard by 23 days and John Glenn’s orbital flight by 10 months.