Russian Pilot Crashes, Is Briefly Jailed in Lithuania

By Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C. O'Brien

Think you've ever had a bad flying day? Put yourself in Valery Troyanov's flying boots. He started September 15th briefing-in for a routine training flight in one of the world's most advanced fighter planes. But the exhilarating takeoff was the last thing that went really right for him that day (well, his ejection seat didn't malfunction -- that's good news, I suppose). At the end of the day, he was in a foreign jail.

How does your worst "bad flying day" measure up to that?

Major Troyanov is a fighter pilot with the 177th IAP (Fighter Aviation Regiment) at Lodejnoe Pole (ICAO Identifier ULPO) east of St. Petersburg. He flies the Sukhoi Su-27, a supersonic air superiority fighter that's the pride of the VVS, the Russian Military Air Forces. And the mission, according to Russian sources, couldn't have been more routine.

The jets -- three, not as a flight but three single-ships at periodic intervals -- were to launch, fly to Chkalovsky Air Field which is near the city of Kaliningrad, and conduct joint air defense exercises with Russian Baltic Fleet units in Kaliningrad.

The three Su-27s launched at ten-minute intervals. Troyanov was the last of them. His next task was to navigate to Kaliningrad while staying in Russian or international airspace. Here's where things went wrong.

Kaliningrad Special Region of the Russian Federation is an interesting place. From its founding by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, the city was populated by Germans, by pre-Germanic Prussian Balts (a dead race who spoke and wrote a dead language), by Poles and by merchants of many nations. Until 1946 it was called Konigsberg; ethnically cleansed of Balts by the Teutons, of Poles and Jews by the Nazis, and of Germans by the Soviets in turn, it is now a Russian enclave surrounded by EU and NATO powers.

It's the only place in Russia that kept its Stalinist name.

If you flight plan from Lodejnoe Pole (ULPO) to Chkalovsk - Lyublino-Novoye (UMWD) you'll see it's quite impossible to get from here to there without getting passed through NATO-protected airspace, or flying over the Baltic Sea. The flight was planned over the Baltic Sea. You can see from the map that while making landfall in Russian territory requires precise navigation, with working equipment it shouldn't be a problem.

For the other members of the mission it wasn't.

Not so Troyanov. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, his Sukhoi suffered a complete failure of navigation equipment. So he contacted ground control and asked for help, confessing his disorientation.

The controllers couldn't pinpoint him on their radars. Finally, Troyanov elected to circle while trying to get re-oriented. Soon enough even that option was foreclosed to him, as he ran low on fuel. Maj Valery Troyanov's bad day must have seemed to hit rock bottom when he came to the decision to eject from what was, apart from any nav malfunction, a perfectly functioning jet.

Fortunately, Troyanov got a good chute, and landed unhurt (and on land, rather than in the frigid Baltic). So things were looking up. He got out a cell phone and -- lo and behold! He had a signal. Dialing his unit, he talked to the commander of the 177th. He was still on the phone with the boss ("the good news is, you didn't lose a pilot. Now for the bad news") when local first responders arrived, alerted by a phone call from a citizen who saw a parachute.

And that's when Valery Troyanov learned he wasn't down in Russia. He was in Lithuania, and the relations between the Russian government and the onetime Soviet satellite state of Lithuania never get better than frigidly correct. He might have been feeling like an airman who had survived a narrow escape, but now the treatment he could look forward to ranged from "arrested as an illegal immigrant" to "shot as a spy." Pretty unpleasant outcomes, these, for a simple jet jockey.

Troyanov was taken into custody and brought to the police station, where police and intelligence agents questioned him. He then was removed to the military airfield at Kaunas, where flight surgeons examined him and gave him a clean bill of health. Then he was locked up for the evening.

Meanwhile, Lithuanian searchers had found the remains of Troyanov's jet and posted guards on it. There was, of course, no postcrash fire, and to the chagrin of the Russian military, sensitive items (particularly the IFF module) appear to have survived the crash.

Lithuanian diplomats delivered a frosty demarche to Russian counterparts, who routinely deny airspace incursions. In this case, there's no point in denial, as the Lithuanians had physical evidence in the form of Troyanov and what's left of his plane. Lithuanian prosecutors have also started a criminal case on the border violation.

They also had other evidence: radar tapes. Troyanov's bad day could indeed have been worse, because Lithuanian air defense is in the hands of a NATO contingent from Germany and the Lithuanian radar had been tracking him for at least six minutes, and jets were inbound.

Of course, interception might not have been such a bad outcome for Troyanov, as the German Phantoms would have escorted him to a safe landing. He would have still ended up under lock and key, but his airplane would have been intact, and sooner or later he and the plane would have been let go. Sometime this week the Russians will probably either get the wreckage of the Su-27 back, or at least get access to the accident site. After all, those pieces of jet might be out of place, but they are the property of the Russian people.

And Troyanov? He has already been let go. What about that criminal case? Well, he was never the defendant, only a witness, the Lithuanians say -- and he's already given his statement.

Of course, by the end of his bad day, Major Troyanov had one more discomfiting event befall him: he was the subject of discussions between Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and his commander's commander, Major General Vladimir Sviridov of the 6th Army Air Force and Antiaircraft Defense of the Leningrad Military Region (yes, the Russians changed the name of the city, but not the military district. Maybe they had a lot of letterhead already printed).

While Major Valery Troyanov will, one hopes, never have a day anywhere near this bad in the rest of his flying career, this incident will certainly have consequences in the Baltic region. It may also have far-reaching consequences in the Russian military -- there is already a widespread belief in Russia that military aviation is operating on a shoestring. If Troyanov was sent into harm's way by bad maintenance or cut corners, this could become a political football in Russia. It could be quite some time before the Major is back to the comfortable obscurity of one fighter pilot in a big Air Force.

FMI: www.mil.ru