Ormaņu Street Incident

I had heard about this event a long time ago, but I always considered it an urban legend, because there was no reliable news at all.

So what is the story about? You won't believe it, but it's about the disaster in Agenskalns again. This time, it's about the most noble and remarkable type of man-made disaster possible - a plane crash.

In general, there have been many different accidents with flying machines in the territory of present-day Latvia, even more than you can imagine. The honor of being a pioneer here belongs to Tom Johansson, a Swedish blacksmith from Priekule, who in 1670 forged wings of an unknown design and, jumping from the tower of the Priekule church, managed to fly about two kilometers with them. The landing was very successful, as the aerosmith only broke his leg, not punched a hole in his brain.

On July 6, 1910, the first airplane flight in Latvia took place, when pilot Teodors Meibaums flew over the meadows of Zolitude for 56 seconds at an altitude of 8 meters in a German-made monoplane. The first airplane crash did not take long either. It happened in 1913, when a Sikorsky S-10 seaplane of the Imperial Russian Navy, which took off from Liepāja, lost control and fell into the Baltic Sea 90 m from the shore, drowning the pilot Pyotr Waksmut, while the passenger suffered serious injuries. In the post-war period, 79 aviation incidents have occurred in Latvia, ranging from completely curious to tragic, when both pilots and people on the ground died. Among the curious ones is the situation on the evening of May 8, 1945, when Russian soldiers, having heard about the victory in the war, organized a thorough shooting in the air near Jelgava, as a result of which they shot down one of their own planes, the wing of which was torn off in the air. The most tragic is the Aeroflot flight L-51 to Liepāja on December 30, 1967, when the plane, due to absolutely illiterate landing control, crashed into the ground near the airfield, killing 43 people. There have also been many incidents where it is stated that the fate of the pilot is unknown, but it is absolutely clear that he died. He did not stay in the air. It is simply that the statistics looked better after such a phrase.

Okay, we've flown quite far, but we're coming back to Āgenskalns in a narrow circle. What happened here in the very early sixties? For years, people said that a plane or helicopter had crashed somewhere near the market. Some rumors mentioned a more specific location, that it had crashed, hitting a house at Ormaņu Street 19, and that's why it had developed something like a camel's hump. They talked and talked, but there were no details and it was always vague and general, because no one had really seen anything themselves. One aunt said...

However, over the past week I have spoken to two eyewitnesses to this event, whom I have no reason not to believe, because I know both of them very well. My long-time colleague at Latvian Television, TV Panorama director Andris Kuzmins, lived in the last house on Nāras Street at the edge of the park at the time. He remembers that it happened in the fall of 1960 or the spring of 1961, because the trees had no leaves. So, that day he was in the yard of the house and spoke through the window to a neighbor boy, Oskars, his schoolmate, and tried to persuade him to come out. Suddenly, a helicopter appeared above the houses from the side of Ormaņu Street. It came from the side of Ernestīnes Street, the rotor was practically no longer spinning and it fell into the neighbors' gardens, damaging the attic part of the building at 23 Ormaņu Street with its rotor blades, which was later patched up, but the place of the defect was always clearly visible. It should be noted that now both buildings have been demolished and in their place there are completely different, but similar-sized houses. The fuselage of the aircraft itself is somehow hanging in the blades that have caught in the walls of the houses. Its tail part has broken off and is visible in the gap between the buildings. Fuel began to seep out of the machine, which later flowed in a stream down the slope to Meteora Park. Then the pilot got out of the aircraft, holding his jaw with his hand, it was broken or dislocated, but there was no bloodshed. He had no other injuries, because he had been walking the whole time. Andris saw all this with his own eyes and without obstacles, because by jumping over a few fences he reached the very epicenter of the events. Nothing much happened. The militia and army officers appeared very quickly, pushing all interested parties away.

The second witness is Ērika Oša, who lived a little away from the scene of the incident. At the time, she was in the kitchen of the apartment with her little sister and mother at the table. Ērika, who was a first-grader at the time, suddenly sees through the kitchen window that a helicopter is crashing into the house. That's right - crashing into it. She is very scared, but when she recovered, she watched what was happening on the street from the window on the other side of the apartment. This is the only dissonance in the testimonies, because Ērika claims that she saw the crashed helicopter from her window through the gap between buildings 21 and 23, but Andris definitely claims that it was between buildings 23 and 25, where Ērika, in turn, could not have seen it. However, the 17-meter-long body could have created all kinds of optical variations. She also remembers that a very large car, a Čaika or ZIM, which were at the disposal of the highest state officials at that time, drove up to house 21, and a person in a coat got out of it and, together with others, entered the garden through the gap between houses 21 and 23 on the opposite side of the street, where the crashed helicopter, which was in the garden, was visible. Civilians were isolated from the scene, the street was closed, and cars of various sizes began to drive up to evacuate the helicopter. Both Ērika and Andris note that the next day there was absolutely nothing left to testify to what had just happened. At least two other people are known to have seen the moment of the disaster, but they do not remember much of the details.

So, what really happened there? After comparing the facts, the time of the incident could have been the spring of 1961, most likely April. It happened in the afternoon, but since we lived in a different time zone at the time, the evenings in April were already long. Most likely, the emergency landing was made by an army helicopter Mi1 or Mi 4 and only by amazing luck did it survive without an explosion, fires in the surrounding houses and victims on the ground. At that time, these were the only helicopters at the disposal of the army, because the era of such flying machines had just begun. Mi1 was a model that had been hatched for many years in Mikhail Mil's design bureau and, despite several prototype crashes, it began to be mass-produced in 1954. Its length was 12 meters and the rotor diameter was 14 meters. The second model, Mi4, as an army transport helicopter, began to be produced in 1953 and was almost 17 meters long and the rotor diameter was 21 meters. It was just a coincidence that it strongly resembled the 1950 Sikorsky H-19 Chickasaw, both in the design of the parts, in the overall lines and in the innovative engine layout. As Andris recalls, the crashed helicopter looked like a cucumber with a tail, which is what the Mi 1 looks like, because the other one looked like a pumpkin with a propeller stuck in it. The pilot probably realized earlier that the “chopper” was about to fall and most likely managed to contact the air traffic controllers and predict the place of the fall. This also explains the quick appearance of the militia and army. It is possible that the pilot had planned to land in Meteora Park, but the Soviet equipment did not support this plan. The quick arrival of the services also prevented the existence of many eyewitnesses, closing the street and clearing the perimeter of curious people. The event remained at the level of rumors for decades, because it happened during working hours and there were not too many witnesses at all. For example, on the other side of Āgenskalns, near the Švarcmuiža vegetable gardens, where I lived at the time, no one spoke about such an event in my presence. It was not mentioned in the statistics either, because the file, which lists all aviation-related accidents, even very detailed ones, in the territory of Latvia since 1913, does not contain data on this event.

More than sixty years have passed since the incident, it has become overgrown with a considerable crust of improbability and sounds like the stories of marginals over a glass. There are also extremely few living witnesses and it sounded even more like a local saga until last Sunday, when this event resurfaced. This time I decided to investigate it and to my great surprise discovered that for the last 22 years I have lived right next to the crash site. It fell about 20 meters from the children's playground in the corner of my yard, on the territory of a neighboring house. Paradoxically, how many years had to pass before I finally believed in the truth of the story and began to investigate it. There are only eyewitness memories, but at the official level it will always remain on the shelf of the army aviation archive cabinet, in a box called "Nothing to brag about"...