Chronicle of the missing bomber (32 photos)

The searchers, thanks to hunters, found the remains of a Soviet bomber in the remote taiga.

On December 17, 1939, at approximately 9.00-9.05, it was barely dawn, the bomber of the flight commander of the 80th Bomber Aviation Regiment, Senior Lieutenant Georgy Vasilyevich Karalkin, apparently in a hurry and out of extreme necessity, took off from the Yagodnik island airfield 17 km from Arkhanegelsk along the Northern Dvina River. The haste was due to the army offensive, which began precisely on December 17 - bomber power was necessary to destroy the Finnish fortifications. The Soviet-Finnish or Winter War gave the first slippage and the bombers had to destroy the power of the Chukhon pillboxes. The need was also evident in the fact that the weather that day was disgusting: low cloudiness of 100 points, gusty winds of 10-12 meters per second, air temperature 0-minus 2 degrees Celsius, snow cover reached 10-15 cm, in the evening it began expected snowfall... Crappy weather, fraught with wandering, danger of piloting at low altitude, icing in damp air.
The bomber with four crew members on board flew to Ukhta (now Kalevala) or to the village of Reboly, heading west, to the war.
At 9.22 on board time the plane crashed into a forest...

Today it is difficult to clearly name the cause of the plane's death. Apparently, as usual: a set of circumstances that, when coincident, gave a fatal result. Difficult weather conditions, piloting error, icing, possibly technical reasons... An indisputable fact: the SB-2 bomber with engines running at nominal hit the tops of the forest on the high bank of a taiga river and was torn apart by the trunks on the spot, like paper. Apart. In rags. In shreds.

The spread of debris is 30 by 20 meters, no more. There is no characteristic impact crater. Everything was left lying on the surface, doused with gasoline and oil. It was only a miracle that the wrecked car did not burst into flames. The bomber produced at the 22nd plant in Kazan in August 1939 did not end up in the war. To search for the missing crew, one squadron of TB-3 bombers from the same 80 BAP made 25 sorties over two days. But no traces of Karalkin’s plane were found... Four people and the security team disappeared into the taiga of the Onega Peninsula.