​​Landing in a Cornfield. Soviet version

On 8 August 1970, an Aeroflot An-10A departed Vinnytsia for Simferopol. There were 107 passengers and 7 crew on board.

About ten minutes after takeoff, the aircraft climbed to 5,400 meters. Suddenly, the pilots saw smoke in the cockpit and smelled burning insulation. The flight engineer went to the forward cabin and reported to the captain that smoke was coming through gaps in a ceiling panel. The captain ordered the crew to switch to emergency electrical power, reduce speed, and lower engine thrust. He then extended the landing gear and began an emergency descent.

At 4,000 meters, the first officer shut off the bleed air from all four engines, initiated an emergency depressurization, and depressurized the aircraft. After that, the smoke stopped. The captain decided to divert to the nearest airport, Chișinău. The crew retracted the landing gear but continued descending to 2,400 meters.

Suddenly, there was a sharp bang. The first officer and the flight engineer then saw a fire on engine No. 4 (the outer right engine). The captain ordered the propeller to be feathered and the fire extinguishing system to be activated. At the same time, he began turning the aircraft toward flat terrain suitable for a forced landing. However, three minutes later, at an altitude of about 1,000 meters, the engine fire stopped, so the captain decided to try to make it to Chișinău after all.

With 80 kilometers remaining to the airport, the flight engineer reported a problem in the hydraulic system. This could cause the No. 4 engine propeller to unfeather on its own and enter autorotation. That is exactly what happened when the aircraft was 55 kilometers from Chișinău, at an altitude of 720-730 meters.

The sudden increase in drag caused a right bank and the aircraft began to yaw. The pilots applied full left control inputs and advanced the remaining three engines to takeoff power. They managed to prevent the speed from dropping. But because only one engine was producing thrust on the right wing while two were running on the left wing, the asymmetric thrust made the right bank and right turn even worse.

Realizing it was impossible to reach the runway under these conditions, the captain decided to perform a forced landing. At dusk, he spotted what appeared to be a flat cornfield. However, he did not know that beneath the two-meter-tall stalks there was a shallow ravine running perpendicular to the landing direction.

The An-10 landed “on its belly.” After plowing through the ground, the aircraft jumped over the ravine, then slammed into the opposite slope and continued forward, breaking apart. About 275 meters from the initial touchdown point, the aircraft yawed around and came to a stop. The crew completed the evacuation in roughly 15 minutes. Four passengers were seriously injured and 21 sustained minor injuries. No one died at the crash site, but one critically injured passenger died on the way to the hospital.

The accident was caused by the failure and fire of engine No. 4. The engine failed because a turbine roller bearing was destroyed due to oil starvation after the jet orifices in the fuel-nozzle ring became clogged with oil decomposition products (coke). As a result, responsibility was attributed to the engine manufacturer, which had allowed a design deficiency in the AI-20K engine and had not taken measures to prevent this defect - oil coking in the turbine roller-bearing assembly.