A Lockheed C-130 shot down over the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1958

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Hercules Memorial in Fort Meade , Maryland
Photo of the Hercules, summer 1958
Turkey (orange) and Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (green)
The C-130, captured by the shooting camera of the MiG-17 pilot Kutscherjajew

The downing of a Hercules over Armenia on September 2, 1958 was an incident between the Soviet and American air forces during the Cold War . In the incident Soviet shot MiG-17 -Jagdflugzeuge a reconnaissance plane of the US Air Force of type C-130 Hercules over the Armenian SSR from.

Course of the flight

The Hercules C-130A-II Sun Valley I with the tail unit identification 60528 ( USAF serial number 56-0528 ) belonged to the 7406th Support Squadron of the United States Air Forces in Europe (stationed at Rhein-Main Air Base ). The crew consisted of six members of the flight crew as well as eleven language specialists from the 6911th Radio Group Mobile (radio reconnaissance ).

The flight started at 10:21 a.m. local time from Incirlik Air Base near Adana in southern Turkey for a COMINT mission. At 11:42 a.m., the crew sent a radio message for the last time over Trabzon at an altitude of 7,800 meters and a little later penetrated into Soviet airspace. A four-man formation of the MiG-17 with the pilots Gavrilow, Ivanov, Kutscherjajew and Lopatkow, set up for interception, hit the C-130 about 55 kilometers northwest of Yerevan and attacked it with on-board weapons and air-to-air missiles. As a result of the impact, the right wing was damaged and the tail was separated from the fuselage, whereupon the aircraft crashed on fire. The Soviet fighter planes then landed on the Leninakan airfield (today "Gyumri").

All 17 crew members were killed when it was shot down. You are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. At the crash site, the small village of Nerkin Sasnaschen in the province of Aragazotn , there is now a memorial.

According to an internal NSA / GCHQ report dated October 3, 1958, the originally planned route of the machine led from Trabzon to Lake Van . Then she should fly back to Incirlik Air Base on the same route. The report suspects that the pilots confused the radio beacon in the Georgian city ​​of Poti with that of Trabzon. Both worked on the same frequency , Trabzon is seen from Lake Van in the same direction as Poti von Ani , where the Hercules violated the Soviet border.

After the launch

The downing posed diplomatic problems for both sides. The Americans first reported a missing research aircraft, and the Soviet Union reported a plane crash without disclosing that the plane had been shot down. The remains of six crew members were handed over to the United States on September 24, 1958.

On November 13, 1958, the Soviet ambassador and the military attaché were summoned to the US State Department and confronted with the tapping logs of the radio communications of the Soviet fighter planes. On February 6, 1959, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles presented radio communications to the UN .

More information became available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union . In 1993, a forensic team of the US armed forces went to the site and repatriated, among other things, the identification tag of a crew member, numerous bone and tooth fragments and debris from the Hercules.

On September 2, 1997, Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan , director of the National Security Agency's radio intelligence agency , opened National Vigilance Park at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort George G. Meade , Maryland . In the park, along with other reconnaissance planes, there is also a Hercules on display, commemorating the victims of 1958.

Exactly 40 years after the shooting down, the last remains of the crew members were buried on September 2, 1998 in a communal grave in Arlington.

See also

literature

  • 0-8041-1911-2, Ulrich Stulle: Hot skies in the Cold War. In: Flieger-Revue. Extra. Vol. 4, 2004, ISSN  2194-2641 , p. 48.
  • Larry Tart, Robert Keefe: The Price of Vigilance. Attacks on American Surveillance Flights. Ballantine Books, New York NY 2001, ISBN 0-8041-1911-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ C-130 Shootdown ( Memento January 28, 2010 on the Internet Archive ), National Security Agency
  2. ↑ Crew Of A United States Air Force C-130 Aircraft, September 2, 1958 , Arlington National Cemetery
  3. ^ David Underwood: Armenian Food: A Day of Oghormi at Nerkin Sasnashen - Honoring the Dead. In: armenianfood.blogspot.de. June 26, 2006, accessed May 8, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Shooting down of US C-130 Transport Aircraft in the Transcaucasus ( Memento from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Shoot immediately , Der Spiegel , September 12, 1983
  6. ↑ Photos from the National Vigilance Park ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )

Coordinates: 40 ° 22 ′  N , 43 ° 59 ′  E