Прикоснутся к истории.
На выходных в спортклубе были. Сидим с другом в джакузи, треплемся о всякой хуйне, тут дедок с другог конца джакузи начинает выпытывать что за язык. Мы говорим - русский. А откуда родом - из Москвы! Я всегда говорю из Москвы, это минимизирует количество дополнительных вопросов, ибо где Москва знают все.
Тут дедок начинает рассказывать невероятную историю, что его жена, простая американка, мол была в Москве. В 1957 году. И не просто была, а лежала в больнице. И не просто с простудой, а после авиакатострофы! Их самолет, мол разбился, при посадке. Ей было 12 лет. Она летела из Польши, с мамой. Выжили - она, мама, и одна стюардеса. Каким ветром американку с дочкой занесло в Польшу и Москву в 57м году - история умалчивает увы.
Добравшись до интернета, я пробил историю, и точно, все так и есть. Была такая авиакатастрофа в 1957 году. И даже про американцев говорится!
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%B0_%D0%98%D0%BB-14_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B4_%D0%92%D0%BD%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BC_(1957)
Чего там не говорится, так это история их спасения. Мимо поля/места где упал самолет ехал на машине какойто английский радио журналист/комментатор (фамилии не запомнил я). Который в то время работал в Москве. Он увидел пожар, повернул машину в поле, и при свете фар нашел ее и маму, в грязи и картошке, или что там росло. Он потом лет 50 спустя приезжал в Америку и специально заезжал к ним...
Вот так вот сходишь в клуб.
Нашел имя журналиста
IRVING R. LEVINE, и отрывок из его книги про СССР, подробно описывающий инсидент, fascinating story:
(https://archive.org/stream/mainstreetussr010567mbp/mainstreetussr010567mbp_djvu.txt)
The control tower's reason for keeping us aloft in the storm had been
that it had lost contact with another plane, a Polish airliner, that was
due in a half hour before us. The Polish plane had radioed that it
was at six thousand feet, could see the airport, and was heading in
to land. This surprised the control-tower personnel because the ceiling
at the airport was only three hundred feet. That was the last radio
contact with the plane. The tower operators thought that perhaps the
Polish pilot was actually seeing another airfield and had confused it
with Moscow's Vnukova. Phone calls were put in to other airfields,
military and civil, in the Moscow area to ask if a Polish airplane had
landed.
FIRST FLIGHT BY MOZHAISKY 231
At midnight, just after we had put down, and about an hour after
the control tower had lost track of the Polish plane, a bruised, bare-
footed, mud-caked Polish stewardess walked into the airport terminal.
The Polish plane had crashed, but she had survived.
Thrown clear of the wreckage, she retained consciousness and saw
moving lights on a distant road. Her shoes lost in the impact, she struggled
through thick woods to the road and stood in the oncoming glare of a
car's headlights. By gestures, the resourceful girl managed to convey
to the Russian, who understood no Polish, that a plane had crashed
He drove her to the airport. She was able to lead a rescue party back
to the wreckage. Only then did she succumb to hysteria.
When the courageous girl stumbled into the airport building, we
were in a room filling out papers for the customs and waiting for our
passports to be stamped. Harold Milks of the Associated Press
driven out to the airport to meet Roy and me. Norton's wife was there
to meet him with their car. As Milks, Essoyan, and I were walking out
of the terminal building we got our first inkling of what had occurred.
A Russian friend working at the airport told me in a low voice, "There's
been a catastrophe. A Polish plane has had an accident." She knew no
details and no one else at the airport would talk. We were able to
learn only that a rescue party had just left the airport.
We drove along the road that leads twenty miles into Moscow,
and about five miles from the airport we saw three vehicles drawn
up beside the road, their headlights focused on the edge of the woods
several hundred feet from the roadside. There was an old army ambu-
lance and two small airport buses. We could see two men jest heading
into the woods, followed by a Russian woman in a white frock, a nurse,
bearing a stretcher. Milks, who luckily carried a flashlight, Essoyan,
and I climbed down the embankment off the road, caught up with the
nurse and made our way through the woods. We could soon hear men
whistling signals in the distance. A quarter of a mile farther and we
broke out of the woods into a newly plowed field. At the far end of
the field, against the black sky, we could see the dim silhouette of a
plane's tail. In the darkness a dozen men stood about aimlessly. It
came as a start to notice that several of them carried rifles and apparently
they were soldiers, which meant we might be on a Russian military
reservation.
Milks had the only light on that weird scene. Neither did the Russian
rescue party have an axe to break into the wreckage if necessary.
232 MAIN STREET, U.S.S.R.
There was not a single piece of ire-fighting equipment. Not even a hand
fire extinguisher.
The light's beam picked out the fuselage broken in two, the tail
section comparatively unshattered, the front section crushed. The wings
were nowhere to be seen. We learned later that they had broken off
on Impact and rolled away from the main wreckage. A twisted propeller
lay far to the right of the fuselage. An engine was partially buried in
the mud. There were bits and pieces of seats, luggage, clothing, strewn
on the field.
Then the flashlight picked out a body. A woman lying face down,
her body disjointed like some sort of rag doll. A moan in the inky
distance froze the aimless rescuers. The Russian woman in white shouted,
Tikho, tikho, meaning "quiet," and we hurried toward the moans. A
woman lay on her back in a furrow of the field. She cried softly in English:
"Help me, help me. If s cold. It's so cold. My leg hurts."
The Russian nurse bent over her, bandaged her bleeding head, and
began to administer an injection. Nearby, another of the Russians began
calling for the flashlight. The nurse insisted that it be kept on the woman
until the Injection was completed. Then we focused it on the other
Russian, as the nurse and two others gently lifted the woman's broken
body onto the stretcher. The Russian who had been calling for the
light was standing over the almost naked body of a corpulent man.
In the bizarre way that disasters operate, his clothing had somehow
been stripped from him by the impact. The Russian who was being
referred to as "doctor" by the other Russians said the man was dead.
From the woods we could see a light approaching. I signaled with
Milks's light and soon two policemen came up. The doctor ordered
that the woman be carried out to the ambulance. We lit the way back
through the woods. I walked beside the stretcher, brushing aside
branches and trying to comfort the woman, who was crying, "What hap-
pened? Where's my baby? Where's my child Michelle?"
"You're all right now," I assured her. "There are Americans with
you."
"What happened?" she insisted.
I told her she'd been in an accident.
She again asked for her daughter.
I asked her name. It sounded like "Margo Tamper." She said she
was from Michigan.
When she had been driven off in the ambulance to the airport
FIRST FLIGHT BY MOZHAISKY 233
hospital, we continued on to Moscow, where we telephoned the charge
d'affairs of the U. S. Embassy to inform him that Americans had been
involved in a plane crack-up.
We tried to telephone the story to our offices in London, but the
censors cut us off after only a partial report. It was seventeen hours
before the Soviet censors passed the complete story.
When we were talking to the American charge, unknown to him or
us, a telephone call had been received by the Embassy's duty officer
from a Moscow hospital. An American man, Richard Cheverton, was
calling to say that he had been in an airplane accident. The duty officer
later sent the Embassy's doctor to the hospital.
Later the pieces began to fit together.
When the plane smashed into the field the burst fuselage scattered
its occupants into the mud field. For those who landed face-down,
the mud may have been the cause of death. They smothered. For the
fortunate, the mud was a cushion that saved their lives. That was
true for the Polish stewardess. It was true for the woman we saw at
the wreckage, Mrs. Margaret Tremper. This was the case, too, for
Cheverton and Michelle Tremper, the twelve-year-old child for whom
Mrs. Tremper had been asking.
When we spoke to Cheverton later that morning in the hospital fie
told us that he had found himself up to his knees in mud after the
had grazed the treetops and smacked the ground in a violent downdraft
Cheverton heard someone near him calling *Tm caught, Fm caught "
It was Michelle. She was partially burled in mud. He helped her to her
feet. She was in near-hysterics. Cheverton began looking for other
survivors but then noticed a smoking engine. Fearing an explosion or
fire, he took Michelle's hand and headed toward the lights on the road.
Three cars passed the disheveled couple. A bos stopped a hundred
feet down the road from them, and several of the occupants cautiously
approached them. Taught by their newspapers to be vigilant of foreign
parachute spies, the Russians seemed suspicious. Then Cheverton drew
a picture of an airplane on a piece of paper and made gestures to
Indicate a crash. Cheveiton's and Michelle's faces were bruised and
their head wounds were bleeding. The Russians took them aboard the
bus and continued Into town. On the way, they picked up three police-
men who escorted the foreigners to a Moscow hospital on the road.
There Cheverton was able to make it understood that he wanted to
speak to the American Embassy. A call was placed for Mm,
234 MAIN STREET, U.S.S.R.
The three Americans were members of a tourist group from Grand
Rapids, Michigan. Two others died. So did seven other passengers of
other nationalities.
The Soviet press took note of the occurrence, but just barely.
With evident reluctance, the Soviet news agency Tass covered the
entire episode In a paragraph:
"A passenger plane belonging to the Polish airline, L.O.T. crashed
four to five kilometers from Vnukova airport on June 14. The plane
hit the ground for undetermined reasons when attempting to land.
Four members of the crew and five passengers were killed. The cause
of the catastrophe Is being investigated,"
As for the four survivors: the Polish stewardess was flown back to
Warsaw the day after the accident. Cheverton and Michelle suffered
only slight concussion, painful braises, and minor wounds. They left
by plane, too, several weeks later. Mrs. Tremper had severe concussion,
major leg fractures, and bruises from head to foot. It was several months
before she could be moved, and she was carried on a stretcher aboard
U. S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson's plane to be flown out of
Russia. (Whenever the U. S. ambassador goes "out" to use the word al-
ways employed by Americans in Moscow to describe their journeys
abroad a United States Air Force plane is sent from West Germany.
It must put down in Berlin coming and going to pick up and let off a
Russian radio operator and navigator for the flight over Soviet territory.)
Despite their harrowing experiences, the air crash survivors preferred
taking their chances on flying again rather than endure the rigors of other
modes of Soviet transportation.