Plane crash survivor Larisa Savitskaya. Miracle or right action? Larisa Savitskaya - survivor Larisa Savitskaya, survivor of a plane crash

Statistics stubbornly show that aviation is much higher in terms of safety than motor transport. In the United States, more people die each year in car accidents than have died in plane crashes in the history of air travel.

But even those who suffer disaster in the air still have a chance. Even if it's a one in a million chance. Here are seven stories of those who pulled out their lucky ticket while on the verge of death.

Cecilia Sichan

On August 16, 1989, a regular flight began taking off from Detroit Airport - McDonnell Douglas DC-9-82 of Northwest Airlines. There were 154 people on board, including a 4-year-old girl, Cecilia Sichan. Her parents and six-year-old brother were flying with her.

The airliner began to sway already on takeoff; its left wing touched the lighting mast, part of the wing came off and caught fire. The plane then pitched to the right and the other wing crashed through the roof of a car rental office. The plane crashed onto the highway, broke into pieces, and caught fire. Debris and victims' bodies were scattered over an area of ​​more than half a mile.

Worked at the crash site firefighter John Tied I heard a thin squeak and saw a child’s hand among the rubble. A 4-year-old girl, who suffered a fractured skull, a broken leg and collarbone and third-degree burns, was the only one who managed to survive the disaster. She underwent four skin graft surgeries but managed to make a full recovery.

Cecilia was raised by her aunt and uncle. When the girl grew up, she got a tattoo on her wrist in the shape of an airplane, in memory of that tragic and happy day.

Cecilia admits that she is not at all afraid of flying on airplanes, guided by a principle that is well known in Russia - if it has already happened to her once, the likelihood of it happening again is negligible. Simply put, a shell does not hit the same crater twice.

Larisa Savitskaya

On August 24, 1981, 20-year-old student Larisa Savitskaya was returning from honeymoon together with her husband Vladimir. The An-24 plane was flying from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Blagoveshchensk. Over the city of Zavitinsk at an altitude of 5200 meters, the An-24 collided with a Tu-16 bomber. As a result of the collision, the crews of both aircraft were killed. The An-24 broke into several parts and began to fall. Larisa, who was sleeping in her seat at the rear of the plane, woke up from a strong blow and a sudden burn caused by depressurization of the cabin at altitude.

Another break in the fuselage threw her into the aisle, but Larisa managed to climb back into the chair. As she later recalled, she remembered the Italian film “Miracles Still Happen,” where the heroine saved herself in a similar situation by squeezing into a chair. Larisa herself admitted that she did not believe in salvation, but simply wanted to “die without pain.”

The surviving part of the plane's body fell onto a birch grove, which softened the blow. Experts subsequently established that Larisa Savitskaya fell for 8 minutes from a height of 5200 meters on a piece of aircraft measuring 3 meters wide and 4 meters long.

The blow caused her to lose consciousness for several hours, but then she came to her senses and was able to move independently.

Alone in the forest, among corpses and debris, the girl spent two days, managing to build herself even a semblance of shelter from the weather.

Rescuers who reached the crash site were shocked to see the girl. Larisa Savitskaya was the only one of the 38 people who was lucky enough to survive this plane crash.

The search engines were so sure of her death that a grave had already been prepared for the woman, as well as for other victims. Doctors determined she had a concussion, spinal injuries in five places, and broken arms and ribs. She also lost almost all her teeth.

Larisa Savitskaya is twice included in the Guinness Book of Records: as a person who survived a fall from maximum height, and as a person who received the minimum amount of compensation for physical damage in a plane crash - 75 rubles (in 1981 money).

Vesna Vulovich

On January 26, 1972, a Yugoslav Douglas DC-9 passenger plane on a flight from Copenhagen to Zagreb exploded in the air near the village of Serbska Kamenice in Czechoslovakia at an altitude of 10,160 meters. The cause of the tragedy, according to the Yugoslav authorities, was a bomb hidden on board the airliner by Croatian Ustasha terrorists.

The plane, breaking into pieces, began to fall down. In the middle section was 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovic. Vesna should not have been on that flight - she was replacing her colleague and namesake, Vesna Nikolic.

The plane's debris fell on snow-covered trees, which softened the blow. But luck for the girl was not only this - she was first discovered in an unconscious state by a local peasant, Bruno Honke, who worked in a German field hospital during the war and knew how to provide first aid.

Immediately after this, the flight attendant, the only survivor of the crash, was taken to the hospital. Vesna Vulović spent 27 days in a coma and 16 months in a hospital bed, but still survived. In 1985, she was included in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest jump without a parachute, receiving a certificate from the hands of her musical idol, member of the famous Beatles group Paul McCartney.

Erica Delgado

On January 11, 1995, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-14 was flying from Bogota to Cartagena with 47 passengers and 5 crew members on board.

Due to an altimeter failure during landing, the plane literally crashed in a swampy area. 9-year-old Erica Delgado, who was flying with her parents and younger brother, was thrown out of the plane at the moment when it began to fall apart. The girl later said that her mother pushed her out of the plane.

The plane exploded and caught fire. Erica fell into a pile of seaweed, which softened the blow, but could not get out. According to her recollections, looting immediately began at the scene of the disaster: from her, from the living one, one of local residents tore off the gold necklace and disappeared, ignoring requests for help. After some time, the girl was found by her screams and pulled out of the swamp by a local farmer. Erica Delgado, the only survivor of the disaster, escaped with only a broken arm.

Julianna Dealer Kepke

On December 24, 1971, a Peruvian LANSA Lockheed L-188 Electra was struck by lightning and subjected to severe turbulence. The plane began to disintegrate in the air at an altitude of 3.2 kilometers and fell deep into the tropical forest, about 500 kilometers from the country's capital, Lima.

17-year-old schoolgirl Julianna Koepke was strapped into one of the seats in the row, which broke off from the rest of the frame. The girl fell amid the raging elements, while the fragment rotated like a helicopter blade. This, as well as the fall into the dense crowns of trees, softened the blow.

After the fall, Julianne's collarbone was broken, her arm was badly scratched, her right eye was swollen shut from the impact, and her entire body was covered in bruises and scratches. Nevertheless, the girl did not lose her ability to move. It also helped that Julianne's father was a biologist and taught her the rules of survival in the forest. The girl was able to get food for herself, then found a stream and went down its course. After 9 days, she went out to the fishermen, who saved Julianna.

Based real story Julianne Kepke made several feature films, including “Miracles Still Happen” - the one that ten years later will help Larisa Savitskaya survive a plane crash.

Bahia Bakari

On June 30, 2009, an Airbus A-310-300 aircraft of a Yemeni airline was flying flight 626 from Paris to Comoros with a transfer in the Yemeni capital Sana'a.

Among the passengers was 13-year-old Bahia Bakari, who was flying with her mother from France to the Comoros Islands to visit her grandparents. The plane crashed in Indian Ocean V territorial waters Comoros just a few minutes before landing. The girl does not remember what exactly happened, since she was sleeping at the time of the disaster. Bahiya herself believes that she was thrown out of the porthole.

In the fall, she received multiple bruises and broke her collarbone. However, a new test awaited her - she had to survive in the water until rescuers arrived. The girl managed to climb onto one of the wreckage of the plane that remained afloat. She spent nine hours on it, as Bakari herself claims, although some sources claim that rescuers found her only 14 hours after the disaster.

The surviving passenger was found by fishermen, who took her to the hospital. Not everyone believed in the possibility of such a rescue - there were rumors that the girl was thrown out of the boat of illegal immigrants, fortunately Bahia has a suitable appearance.

The girl was taken by special plane to Paris, where the then President of France visited her in the hospital. Nicolas Sarkozy.

Bahia Bakari was the only survivor of the 153 people on board the plane. Six months after the disaster, Bakari published her autobiography, Survivor.

"Lucky Four"

On August 12, 1985, the world's largest aviation disaster involving a single aircraft occurred in Japan.

The Boeing 747SR airliner of Japan Airlines took off from Tokyo to Osaka. There were 524 passengers and crew members on board. 12 minutes after takeoff, while climbing to an altitude of 7,500 meters, the plane’s vertical tail stabilizer came off, resulting in depressurization, a drop in cabin pressure and all the airliner’s hydraulic systems failing.

The plane became uncontrollable and was virtually doomed. Nevertheless, the pilots, with incredible efforts, managed to keep the plane in the air for another 32 minutes. As a result, he crashed near Mount Takamagahara, 100 kilometers from Tokyo.

The airliner crashed in a mountainous area, and rescuers were able to reach it only the next morning. They did not expect to meet survivors.

However, the search team found four people alive at once - a 24-year-old flight attendant Yumi Ochiai, 34 year old Hiroko Yoshizaki with my 8 year old daughter Mikiko and 12 year old Keiko Kawakami.

Rescuers found the first three on the ground, and 12-year-old Keiko was found sitting in a tree. It was there that the girl was thrown out at the time of the death of the liner.

The four survivors were nicknamed the "Lucky Four" in Japan. During the flight, all of them were in the tail compartment, in the area where the plane's skin ruptured.

In this terrible catastrophe many more people could have survived. Keiko Kawakami later said that she heard the voice of her father and other wounded people. As doctors later established, many of the Boeing passengers died on the ground from wounds, cold and painful shock, since rescue teams did not try to reach the crash site at night. As a result, 520 people became victims of the crash.

In August 1981, the spouses Larisa and Vladimir Savitsky were returning home after their honeymoon. Their wedding was still in the spring, but they decided to postpone their honeymoon to the summer - after all, Larisa was a student and could not interrupt her studies.
The newlyweds flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to their native Blagoveshchensk. They settled down in the tail section of the An-24RV aircraft and dozed off peacefully...
Suddenly Larisa woke up from a terrible blow. At an altitude of 5,200 meters, their plane collided with a Tu-16 bomber! U passenger airliner the wings were torn off and the upper part of the fuselage was cut off... “Screams were heard everywhere. I turned to my husband and saw that he was already dead - he was killed by shrapnel. I said goodbye to Volodya and began to wait for death,” Larisa recalls about those events.
“While we were falling, footage from the American film “Miracles Still Happen,” which Volodya and I recently watched in the cinema, suddenly flashed before my eyes. There, the girl also got into a plane crash and, huddled in her seat, fell over the jungle. Following her example, I moved to the chair near the porthole to see how much was left to the ground, and grabbed it with a death grip.”
A few hours after the fall, Larisa came to her senses. She was the only survivor of nearly forty passengers.

“When I opened my eyes, I saw my husband right in front of me, a few meters away. It seemed that he wanted to see me and thus said goodbye to me,” Larisa says about past events.
As a result of the fall, the woman received numerous injuries. She suffered a broken spine, arm and several ribs, knocked out teeth and a serious concussion. But due to shock, Larisa did not feel pain. She built herself a small shelter, warmed herself with seat covers and covered herself with a piece of polyethylene from the rain and mosquitoes.
The woman spent three long days in the taiga before she was discovered by a ground search team. Before this, she had been seen several times by helicopter pilots, but was mistaken for the cook of a geological expedition. No one could have imagined that after such an accident there could be survivors.


The Soviet government classified the fact of the plane crash. Not a single line was written about what happened in any newspaper. And near the ward, where Larisa came to her senses for three months, two people in civilian clothes were constantly on duty, not allowing any of her friends to see her. However, this was a common practice: planes in the USSR of those years crashed several times a year, and any information about disasters in the Union was always hidden.
“I learned from my parents that they had already dug a grave for me. The relatives of all passengers on that flight were notified of their deaths according to the list. In addition, my parents advised me not to tell anyone about what happened. The relevant authorities worked with them and persistently asked them to remain silent,” said Larisa.


After a terrible plane crash, Larisa Savitskaya was included in the Guinness Book of Records twice:
- as a survivor of a fall from a height of 5200m,
- and as a recipient of the minimum amount of compensation for damage in a plane crash - 75 rubles
According to Gosstrakh standards in the USSR, 300 rubles were required. compensation for damages for the dead and a quarter of it - 75 rubles. for the survivors.
After the plane crash, Larisa was paralyzed, but she was still able to get out, although she was forced to do odd jobs and even went hungry.
In 1986, Larisa gave birth to a son, Gosha, and the two of them for a long time lived on child care benefits.
In the 2000s, Larisa Savitskaya gave interviews, although reluctantly. The most difficult things in her life, perhaps, were not those days in the taiga, which she spent next to the remains of the plane and the body of her husband, but all the subsequent years. But extraordinary luck, combined with no less unusual composure, helped her out here too.
And once, in an interview, Larisa Savitskaya said: “If they left me here, it means I have to do something else...”.


The same place where the plane crashed

The story of Amur resident Larisa Savitskaya, the only survivor of the 1981 plane crash, continues to excite the public. After Amur.info reported that the project of the film “Alone”, telling about the fate of Savitskaya, was presented in Moscow, a relative of Larisa’s deceased husband contacted the editors. She said that Vladimir Savitsky’s family is against filming the film.

Yulia Grushkovskaya, née Savitskaya, now lives in St. Petersburg. She is the niece of Vladimir Savitsky. He died along with the pilots and passengers of the plane on August 24, 1981. Vladimir was only 19 years old.

Vladimir and Larisa studied in Blagoveshchensk - he at the medical institute, she at the pedagogical institute. In April 1981, the young people got married and went on their honeymoon in the summer. When we were returning to Blagoveshchensk on the Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk - Komsomolsk-on-Amur - Blagoveshchensk flight, a disaster occurred. An An-24RV civil aircraft and a Tu-16K military bomber collided at an altitude of more than 5 thousand meters. This happened on August 24, 1981.

Everyone died except Larisa. The fragment of the plane with the seat in which the girl was in flew towards a birch grove and then fell to the ground. During the fall, Larisa received various injuries, but was able to move. She later recalled: “Concussion, spinal damage in five places, broken arm, rib, leg. Almost all of the teeth were knocked out. But they never gave me disability. The doctors said: “We understand that you are collectively disabled. But we can’t do anything - each injury individually does not qualify as a disability. Now, if there was only one, but serious, then please,” she said in an interview with Izvestia.

“On the third day of the search operation in the taiga, a passenger, L.V. Savitskaya, born in 1961, was found alive, having received minor injuries (sprain of the left ankle joint, abrasions and bruises in the face). The remaining passengers and crew members of both aircraft were killed,” reads the description of the aircraft collision on a website about aircraft accidents, incidents and air crashes in the USSR and Russia.

When she woke up, she saw her husband’s body - he was lying opposite Larisa. She had to spend several days in the taiga. At the end of August in the Amur region it was already cold at night, and then it was also rainy, so the survivor had to build a shelter from the wreckage of the plane. When the girl was discovered, the rescuers couldn’t believe their eyes: “When the rescuers found me, they couldn’t say anything except “mu-mu.” I understand them. Three days of removing pieces of bodies from trees, and then suddenly seeing a living person. Yes, and I still had the same view. I was all the color of prunes with a silver tint - the paint from the fuselage turned out to be extremely sticky, my mother spent a month picking it out. And the wind turned my hair into a large piece of glass wool. Surprisingly, as soon as I saw the rescuers, I could no longer walk. Relaxed. Then, in Zavitinsk, I found out that a grave had already been dug for me. They were dug according to lists,” Larisa told an Izvestia journalist in 2002.

Larisa’s husband, Vladimir Savitsky, was buried in a cemetery located on the eighth kilometer of Novotroitskoye Highway in Blagoveshchensk. The caretaker of the cemetery told an Amur.info correspondent that it is impossible to find the grave of the young man who died in that plane crash without the help of his relatives. “The fact is that we have been maintaining a register of burials since 1999. But here the year of burial is 1981, so the grave could be in any area,” the caretaker explained.

The relatives of Vladimir, who will forever remain 19 years old, do not want publicity - it pains them to remember the tragedy. However, Vladimir’s niece, Yulia Grushkovskaya, agreed to talk to the correspondent. “None of us relatives knew that they were going to make a film about it. No one asked our side, no one contacted us, we were not informed. I found the director’s contacts, found a link to the Ministry of Culture, found an article that the project of this film had been presented and that actor Sergei Burunov had allegedly been approved for the role of Larisa’s husband. I contacted his manager and she said she didn’t know anything about it and hadn’t seen any script,” says Yulia.

The relatives of the deceased also raise questions about the fact that the famous actor Sergei Burunov has been cast in the role of Larisa’s husband in the film. “Look, Vladimir was a 19-year-old student, with jet black hair. How will a 40-year-old man play a boy?” - Vladimir Savitsky’s niece is perplexed. “We don't want this movie. Let it be documentary about Larisa as a survivor who got into the Guinness Book of Records,” concludes Yulia Grushkovskaya.

As Yulia said, Larisa did not communicate with the relatives of her deceased husband after the tragedy. “Soon she left for Moscow. My mother contacted her son Gregory, this was in 2003. He wrote: “Mom doesn’t want to communicate, you remind her of the tragedy,” added the niece of Vladimir Savitsky.

The publication that they were going to make a film about the story of the miraculous rescue of the Amur woman collected thousands of views. IN Instagram Amur.info readers left more than 200 comments. Among the discussion participants there were those who remember Larisa and studied with her at school or college. Amur.info lists some of them:

- It was a flight Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk - Blagoveshchensk, via Komsomolsk. It was after Komsomolsk that this tragedy happened. The flight then flew once a week, tickets were not available. There is a queue - you stand for several days. I didn’t get a ticket for that day then.

- This flight crashed here, here, approximately over Zavitinsk. I don’t know what flight you didn’t have a ticket for, but on the plane with Larisa Savitskaya were my dear aunt and uncle, my father’s older brother, who, unfortunately, died. And my father was personally at the scene of the accident for identification. The remains of people hung on the trees. And in order to somehow bury it, they collected it in parts. At that time, my uncle was a party worker and almost half the city attended the funeral. And my grandmother later met Larisa Savitskaya and even corresponded with her until we lost contact. And every time I heard or saw Larisa on TV, she told me about her. And if you ask Larisa herself, I think she remembers our last name very well.

- We even have somewhere preserved all the conclusions of the military prosecutor’s office about the cause of the disaster, articles about condolences in the newspaper, everything related to that disaster. In addition, the son and daughter of the deceased uncle are alive, who were also supposed to be on that plane, but stayed behind at the last moment...

“I studied with this girl Larisa from first grade to eighth grade. Photos of our class have been preserved, school 27. I heard the story of her fantastic rescue only in the 2000s. It’s hard to even imagine what she went through. Good health to you, Larisa! And long life!

- From grades 5 to 10, Larisa studied at school 11.

- I think making a film about this is a bad idea! My grandparents died in this plane crash, it was a terrible tragedy that the whole family still remembers. And there is nothing spectacular here. The fact that this woman is lucky is yes, she is lucky to be alive. May God grant her long life! But how will those who have lost their loved ones watch this film?! Haven't you thought about this?!

- Goosebumps... We're waiting for the movie! Long live the woman!

“I was eight years old then, and my dad worked at Rembyttekhnika as a tinsmith. He had to work at night to put together coffins for the “cargo 200”. It was a terrible event in those years. And it was a miracle when he said that they had found a living woman.

- I know her. These are our friends. They lived in Blagoveshchensk. It really was like that. Larisa sold books to live. Left the city. We looked for her and wrote to the Moscow newspaper AiF. But there were no articles about where she was, what happened to her. After the disaster, she had health problems; her husband, who was sitting next to her, died. She was looking for him.

- My father at that time served in Zavitinsk, in the transport regiment as an officer. So our regiment flew out in search of these planes. Larisa was in the Zavitinskaya Central District Hospital.

- I haven't heard this story. I'm looking forward to the release of the film. When will it be released? Long life to this woman!

- Larisa Savitskaya’s mother was Brickman Raisa Sergeevna, who died on the way back from a business trip after falling out of a car. Larisa has a brother, Dmitry. The connection was really lost when Larisa went to live in Moscow, as there was a lot of gossip about her. She graduated from the Pedagogical Institute.

“I know this woman’s husband’s sister, Tatyana, very well. They lived on Amurskaya, corner of Trudovaya, in Blagoveshchensk, Tanya still lives there, in my opinion. Tanya and I worked together for a while, 2003-2005.

A tragic story happened back in 1981. On a clear August day, the couple Larisa and Vladimir Savitsky were returning home after their honeymoon. They got married in the spring, but decided to postpone their honeymoon until the summer, because Larisa was a student and did not want to interrupt her studies.
The newlyweds flew from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to their native Blagoveshchensk. They settled down in the rear of the plane and dozed off peacefully during the flight...
Suddenly Larisa woke up from a terrible blow. At an altitude of 5,200 meters, their plane collided with a Tu-16 military bomber! The wings of the passenger airliner were torn off and the upper part of the fuselage was cut off...
“Screams were heard everywhere. I turned to my husband and saw that he was already dead - he was killed by shrapnel. I said goodbye to Volodya and began to wait for death,” Larisa recalls about those events.
“While we were falling, footage from the American film “Miracles Still Happen,” which Volodya and I recently watched in the cinema, suddenly flashed before my eyes. There, the girl also got into a plane crash and, huddled in her seat, fell over the jungle. Following her example, I moved to the chair near the porthole to see how much was left to the ground, and grabbed it with a death grip.”

A few hours after the fall, Larisa came to her senses. She was the only survivor of 38 passengers.
“When I opened my eyes, I saw my husband right in front of me, a few meters away. It seemed that he wanted to see me and thus said goodbye to me,” Larisa says about past events.
As a result of the fall, the woman received numerous injuries. She suffered a broken spine, arm and several ribs, knocked out teeth and a serious concussion. But due to shock, Larisa did not feel pain. She built herself a small shelter, warmed herself with seat covers and covered herself with a piece of polyethylene from the rain and mosquitoes.

The woman spent three long days in the taiga before she was discovered by a ground search team. Before this, helicopter pilots had seen her several times, but they mistook her for a geologists' cook. No one could have imagined that after such an accident there could be survivors.
The Soviet government classified the fact of the plane crash. Not a single line was written about what happened in any newspaper. And near the ward, where Larisa came to her senses for three months, two people in civilian clothes were constantly on duty, not allowing any of her friends to see her.
“I learned from my parents that they had already dug a grave for me. The relatives of all passengers on that flight were notified of their deaths according to the list. In addition, my parents advised me not to tell anyone about what happened. The relevant authorities worked with them and threatened to remain silent,” says Larisa.

After a terrible plane crash, Larisa Savitskaya was included in the Guinness Book of Records twice:
- as a survivor of a fall from a height of 5200m,
- and as a recipient of the minimum amount of compensation for damage in a plane crash - 75 rubles

After the plane crash, Larisa was paralyzed, but she was still able to get out, although she was forced to do odd jobs and even went hungry. Larisa later learned that after the plane crash, a grave was already prepared for her and her husband, because she was the only survivor.