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Larisa SavitckayaPassenger
Date of Birth: 11.01.1961
Country:  Russia |
Content:
Biography of Larisa Savitskaya
Larisa Savitskaya is a woman who survived an aviation disaster and a fall from a height of 5200 meters. She gained fame as the only survivor of the Zavitinsk airplane crash that occurred on August 24, 1981, when an An-24 aircraft collided with a Tu-16 strategic bomber at an altitude of 5 km. She was born on January 11, 1961, in Blagoveshchensk.
Early Life and Marriage
As a young student, Larisa Savitskaya, together with her husband Vladimir, was returning from their honeymoon. They got married in the spring of 1981 but had to postpone their trip due to exams and internships. After their vacation by the sea, they boarded Flight 811, an An-24RV aircraft, from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. Despite their tickets being for seats in the middle of the plane, they chose to sit in the tail section since there were many empty seats.
The Catastrophe
On August 24, 1981, the An-24 aircraft carrying the Savitsky couple collided with a Tu-16K long-range bomber at an altitude of 5220 meters. The disaster had multiple causes, including poor coordination between military and civilian air traffic controllers. The crew of the An-24 failed to report their deviation from the designated route, and the crew of the Tu-16 falsely reported their altitude as 5100 meters, two minutes before the actual collision.
Both aircraft crews perished in the collision. The An-24 lost both wing consoles with fuel tanks and the upper fuselage. The remaining section of the plane broke apart multiple times during the fall. At the time of the crash, Larisa Savitskaya was sleeping in her seat in the tail section. She woke up from a strong impact and sudden coldness as the temperature instantly dropped from +25°C to -30°C. After another fuselage break, which passed right in front of her seat, Savitskaya was thrown into the aisle. Upon regaining consciousness, she reached the nearest seat, climbed into it, but failed to fasten her seatbelt. Savitskaya later claimed that at that moment, she remembered a scene from the movie "Miracles Still Happen," where the heroine survived a plane crash by huddling in her seat.
A portion of the aircraft fuselage glided into a birch grove, which softened the impact. According to subsequent investigations, the entire descent of the 3-meter-wide and 4-meter-long piece of wreckage, where Savitskaya was located, took eight minutes. She remained unconscious for several hours. When she regained consciousness on the ground, she saw her husband's body in front of her seat. Savitskaya suffered several serious injuries but was able to move on her own. Two days later, rescue teams found her. While waiting for rescue, Savitskaya built a temporary shelter from aircraft debris, using seat covers for warmth and protecting herself from mosquitoes with a plastic bag. It rained throughout those days. When the rain stopped, she waved to passing rescue planes, but they mistook her for a geologist from a nearby camp since they did not expect any survivors. Savitskaya, her husband's body, and two other passengers were the last to be discovered among the crash victims.
She was diagnosed with a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, fractures in her arm and ribs, and lost almost all of her teeth. The consequences of these injuries affected Savitskaya throughout her life. She became the sole survivor among the 38 people on board.
Life After the Crash
The first mention of Larisa Savitskaya was only made during the Perestroika period in the newspaper "Sovetsky Sport" at the end of 1985. However, the article stated that she fell from a height of five kilometers during a test flight of an original aircraft design in 1979, not in 1981.
Despite her numerous injuries, Savitskaya did not receive disability status since, according to Soviet regulations, the severity of her individual injuries did not qualify her for disability benefits. Later, she was paralyzed, but she managed to recover, although she could not perform many tasks and had to rely on sporadic earnings and even experienced periods of hunger.
In 1986, she gave birth to her son, Gosha, and they lived for a long time solely on child care benefits. Her extraordinary life fate attracted media attention, and numerous interviews with Savitskaya were conducted. She became a guest on several television shows and documentaries. Thanks to this media exposure, someone came forward to pay for her dental implants. In the 1990s, she was able to establish a stable income through her own company and bought an apartment in Moscow.
Larisa Savitskaya has been twice included in the Russian edition of the Guinness Book of Records: as the person who survived a fall from the highest altitude and as the person who received the lowest amount of compensation for physical damage – 75 rubles. According to the standards of the Soviet state insurance company, a compensation of 300 rubles was allocated for the deceased and 75 rubles for survivors of aviation disasters.
