As a result of a confluence of unfavorable factors in July 1976, Finnish pilot instructor Kaarlo Rajala and cadet Taito Polet, who flew from the Ivalo region in northern Finland in a light two-seater Cessna (Cessna 150 OH CBX) to the city of Kemi, located on the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia, crossed the state border with the USSR and, having flown to Kandalaksha with an intermediate landing at the Soviet military airfield in Alakurtti, made an emergency landing with a nose-over on the shore of Lake Sergozero in the southeastern part of the Kola Peninsula.
After five days of wandering through a deserted area without food or medicine, the 35-year-old Finnish guys, who naively believed that they were in northern Sweden, were accidentally discovered by Soviet firefighters, after which they were immediately returned to their homeland, where they fell under suspicion of the authorities and secret services, in whose shadow they lived the rest of their lives.
This ordinary case of a pilot losing his bearings in the air and making an emergency landing in an unplanned location, if it had happened in Sweden and not in the USSR, would have ended for the participants with almost no consequences: the Finnish flight authorities would have reprimanded the pilot-instructor and, perhaps, even fined him a small amount, but the state secret services would definitely not have been interested in him and he would not have been subjected to criminal prosecution with the deprivation of his pilot's license, which for some time deprived him and his family of their main source of income.
The episode, which caused quite a stir in Finland, but not in the USSR, where the press remained silent about the predecessors of Mathias Rust, clearly demonstrated the one-sided nature of the good-neighborliness policy pursued by the Soviet state in relation to Suomi, whose ruling elite has remained predominantly Russophobic since 1917 to this day.
The phantasmagoric and tragicomic story, which nevertheless ended with a happy ending for its participants, is worthy of becoming a script for a comedy-adventure film, which would not be inferior in its spectacularity to the famous Soviet-Finnish comedy “Borrowing Matchsticks” (1980).
It breaks the usual patterns and stereotypes: on the one hand, it features carefree Soviet border guards at the airfield in the border town of Alakurtti, who paid no attention to a leisurely refueling foreign plane with foreign identification marks on the fuselage, humane Soviet fighter pilots who did not open fire on the intercepted plane, friendly and hospitable firefighter-saviors, hospitable Pomor fishermen who did not skimp on vodka for their dear guests, kind and welcoming Soviet border guards who delivered the Finnish guys to their homeland without unnecessary bureaucracy and onerous interrogations, quickly and free of charge (Holy cow!) returned their plane to the border on the suspension of a border helicopter. For some reason, the last circumstance especially shocked the Finnish authorities, who did not know the full breadth of the Russian soul.
On the other, dark side of the scenario, there are the watchful and vigilant Finnish border guards who immediately noticed the plane flying east without notice, the suspicious and distrustful investigators of the State Security Police (Supo), Border Guard, Criminal Police and Air Traffic Service who conducted many hours of interrogation to establish all the circumstances of the case and suspected their compatriots of spying for the big and scary eastern neighbor (on whose orders did they fly and did they get paid for it?), the flight authorities who fined the pilot instructor and revoked his flight license for improper performance of his duties.
At 18:00 (17:00 Moscow time) on July 27, 1976, three border guards at the Finnish Kelloselkä border outpost near the village of Salla noticed a light aircraft flying at an altitude of 100–200 meters, heading east, towards the state border, and six minutes after being spotted, it disappeared into the clouds deep in the Soviet Union. According to the instructions, the incident was immediately noted in the log, which contained a description of some of the circumstances: "signs on the fuselage are indistinguishable, average cloud cover, small gusts of southerly wind, visibility in the western direction 20, in the eastern – 10 km."
The incident caused a slight panic at the outpost: the flight had not been agreed upon in advance and the aircraft flew over the border outpost building, apparently not by chance, but with some purpose! For what purpose? Was the plane performing reconnaissance missions in the interests of Finland or the USSR? None of the border guards remembered any similar incidents; the incident stood out brightly and dangerously against the backdrop of the daily boring routine of the Soviet-Finnish border.
After the Second World War, border life on both sides was very strictly regulated: Finnish and Soviet drivers on border roads were forbidden to turn on high beams at night, headlights were not allowed to even accidentally illuminate the territory of the neighboring state, low-altitude flights of aircraft were strictly prohibited, and in rare agreed cases they were carried out at a certain point on the border at an altitude sufficient for their detection by Finnish and Soviet radar stations.
Residents of the Finnish borderland and owners of country houses received special permits to make hay and pick berries in the border strip adjacent to the border, and in return they had to report everything they noticed in this territory.
There were, however, significant differences in the border regime on both sides of the border: by the end of the 1960s, almost all settlements, farmsteads and villages located in the immediate vicinity of the USSR state border were liquidated, and their population was “voluntarily” resettled to large settlements by Karelian standards as part of the all-Union program for the consolidation of settlements. In Finland, permanent and temporary (kesämökki) residence was permitted at a distance of no closer than 2 kilometers from the state border line.
As early as 18:11, the border guards reported the incident to the 5th Communications Centre in Rovaniemi, where a powerful radar station was located, monitoring the air situation up to the state border. At 18:14, the neighbouring outposts in Kotala and Onkamo were warned. At 18:15, a request was sent about the aircraft to the air traffic control centre in Rovaniemi. At 18:18, the headquarters of the Lapland Border Detachment was notified of the situation.
Ten minutes later, the warning was sent to all border outposts of the Kemijarvi Jaeger Border Company. After another 19 minutes of reflection, the Kuusama and Ivalo Border Companies were additionally informed about the incident. Feedback was activated at 19:00, when the radar reported observing an unknown aircraft for 20 minutes, flying east at a speed of 200 km/h between Joutsijärvi and the village of Salla.
On the same day at 20.25, Soviet border commissioner Colonel Shmelev informed the Finnish authorities about the aircraft that entered the country's airspace from Finland at 18.12, two minutes after it was detected by Finnish border guards. A meeting of the border commissioners of the two countries was agreed upon after midnight, and Colonels Shmelev and Mattila arrived at 7:00. A second meeting was held at 17:00, at which the Finnish representative reported precise information about the plane and the pilots.
On July 27, there were as many as five meetings of the border commissioners, at one of which Colonel Mattila gave his Soviet colleague photographs of the missing plane and two pilots, Rajala and Polet. In turn, the Soviet side informed the Finns about the progress of the search for the missing aircraft. Thus, they reported that the plane was spotted 130 km east of the state border. Having received this information, the suspicious Finns asked themselves what seemed to them a logical question: why did the plane continue its route to the east at all, and was not shot down or forced to land, although it was spotted by the USSR air defense. The Finnish authorities did not yet know about the good-natured Soviet pilots who intercepted, but did not shoot down, a small Finnish civilian plane. A chicken is not prey for a big eagle!
After the pilots returned to their homeland, the Finnish special services investigators were especially interested in extremely suspicious circumstances: Rajala's wife, questioned by the police immediately after the pilot's identity was established, reported that her husband planned to return from Ivalo through the village of Kuusamo, located near the state border with the USSR.
The Oulu Air Traffic Control Center, on the contrary, informed the police about the western route declared by the pilot, closer to the Finnish-Swedish border, with an intermediate landing in Aavahelukka. How could this happen? And how else, if not by working for the USSR special services, could one explain their super-fast return to Finland through the border crossing in the Kelloselkä area on August 2, the day after their discovery.
According to the investigators, the pilots gave themselves away as Soviet agents, since it seems that no one on the Soviet side interrogated them the way they would have been interrogated in Finland – long and tediously, as is proper in a real police state, which Suomi has been since the declaration of independence on December 6, 1917, and in which general snitching and informing on fellow citizens is a state-encouraged virtue and a source of personal pride for the informer (Finnish: ilmiantaja).
Seeing the fresh and joyful (and why be sad?: “Homeland is strawberries, and foreign lands are blueberries,” is a Finnish proverb), and not sad and exhausted, faces of the Finnish guys, the investigators did not believe the pilots’ story about five days of wandering across the tundra of the Kola Peninsula without food or rest, thereby revealing a regrettable ignorance in the matter of the excellent regenerative properties of Russian vodka (the object of greatest desire of most Finnish tourists in the USSR/Russia: cheap, high-quality and in an incredible assortment of names, varieties, tastes and types for Finland), which in just two days completely recharged the depleted life forces of the Finnish guys lost in the vastness of the Soviet Union.
A thorough examination of Rajala's and Polet's shoes confirmed the meticulous investigators' case: the boots were photographed by police experts from the front, in profile, from behind, from above and from below, but none of the photos showed any signs of wear typical of a multi-kilometer trek across the tundra. A simple visual examination of Polet's red slingbacks, open-toe clogs, and Rajala's shiny black patent leather boots also exposed the criminal nature of their flight to the Soviet side.
Another detail made it possible to assemble an almost complete puzzle: the citizens suspected of anti-state activity, at their very first police interrogation at the Kelloselkä border outpost on August 2, reported the imminent delivery of the Cessna they had abandoned on the shore of Lake Sergozero to the border by a Soviet border helicopter free of charge.
"A lie!" the investigators thought, believing that the Soviets would not only dismantle the plane into its parts before returning it to Finland, but would also demand financial compensation for the return of the plane and other expenses. The intellectual and, especially, logical abilities of the Finnish investigators were clearly not up to par: why would the Soviet side dismantle the plane of its own agents, which by that time had been produced in the USA in huge quantities and sold almost all over the world?
The investigators’ incorrect train of thought becomes clear if we take into account the flawed curricula of the Finnish school, secondary vocational and, to some extent, higher education at that time, which fostered in young citizens of Suomi a deep mistrust and suspicion of their large eastern neighbor and did not contain information about the breadth and generosity of the Russian soul, which is alien to the pettiness and stinginess characteristic of the Finns as a people and nation.
To deliver a Finnish plane a distance of 300 km on a MI-8 helicopter with the cost of aviation kerosene at 12 kopecks per liter with a consumption of 347 liters per 100 km cost about 120 rubles in 1976 – less than one average monthly salary in the national economy of the USSR in 1975 (150 rubles).
Who doubts that the Soviet superpower could well afford such nanoscopic expenses (the budget revenues of the USSR in 1976 amounted to 232.2 billion rubles), in deeds, not words, acting in the spirit of good neighborliness? Not to mention new shoes for Finnish pilots! The mentality and national-cultural characteristics of the Finns, widely known in greater Europe as outstanding misers (their Western Scandinavian neighbors of German origin are the same), do not imply actions without benefit for themselves – this is the specificity of some Western nations, and generosity is an empty phrase for them, a British "mare's nest", something that does not exist in reality, being an illusion.
This was the problem of the lost Finnish pilots – they told the pure truth during grueling interrogations, which the investigators took for a lie due to the civilizational and cultural-politically conditioned mental limitations of the representatives of the Finnish special services.
On July 25, 1976, at 15:15 Finnish time (16:15 Moscow time), the Cessna 150 OH-CBX aircraft piloted by Kaarlo Rajala, a professional flight instructor who had competed in aerobatic competitions and had 3,000 hours of flying time, took off from the airfield in Ivalo, with the goal of returning to the departure airfield in Kemi, Finland, with an intermediate landing at the Aavahelukka landing site (photo above). On board was cadet Taito Polet. The pilot and the cadet were friends and lived in the neighboring southern suburbs of Oulu – Oulunsalo and Kempele.
The weather forecast was favorable along the entire route, good visibility and wind speeds of up to 10 knots per hour – mainly from the west (240 degrees). No other information was received from the Ivalo airport staff, as all services were closed and, as usual, ignored the pilots of light aircraft, who usually used small landing fields in the wilderness, where the only source of information about weather conditions was a wind cone.
Private light aircraft with skis for landing in winter and seaplanes were not tied to landing fields at all, and navigation was carried out using flight charts and simple control instruments. In truth, the pilots who owned light aircraft caused nothing but trouble and worries to the Finnish aviation authorities, without the possibility of earning any significant sums from their maintenance (this, dear reader, is a capitalist, albeit small, country!).
The rules required keeping a 20-liter canister of aviation gasoline on board, since only a few landing sites had gas stations. Kaarlo Rajala also filled two such canisters at the airport of departure in Oulu – a supply of 40 liters allowed him to cover almost 400 kilometers with a consumption of 23 liters per hour and a cruising speed of 180 km / h.
The Finnish pilot's thrifty nature later played a role in the record-breaking flight duration in the USSR. To navigate in featureless (swamps, lakes, forests and hills-mountains) and almost deserted with rare settlements terrain before the GPS era, pilots used flight maps and an aircraft magnetic compass, and to maintain course in difficult weather conditions, Rajala's plane was equipped with an omnidirectional azimuth radio beacon receiver (VHR / VOR).
The experienced professional pilot knew Finnish Lapland well, and the plane, owned by Kallar Oy, founded by Rajala, was practically new, manufactured in 1970, and had undergone maintenance three weeks before the famous flight. The successful and very robust design allows this type of aircraft to be used for more than 50 years. Only its very older brother, the American B-52 strategic bomber, can compete with it in terms of airframe strength and reliability.
The estimated flight time to the Aavahelukka landing site was only one hour and ten minutes. 20 minutes before landing, the plane encountered dense rain and thunderclouds, which were not in the weather forecast (Finnish meteorologists, where is your conscience and professionalism!). The wind also turned out to be much stronger than the forecast speed, which made life even more difficult for the pilots. Having studied the flight map, they came to the conclusion that they were over the village of Sirkka north of Kittilä, about halfway to the Finnish city of Kemi, and they were strengthened in this opinion when they noticed a highway running along the Ounasjoki River and prepared to fly around a group of flat mountains of Yllästunturi, located near the border with Sweden.
In fact, these were the less high mountains of the Nattanen group north of the Lokka reservoir, already very close to the state border with the USSR. By this time, due to bad weather, the crew of the plane decided to abandon the intermediate landing in Aavahelukka. After consulting, the pilots of the disoriented plane took a course of 170–180 degrees, directly to the south, believing that they were flying between the Torniojoki and Kemijoki rivers, and would be able to fly to Kemi without problems, using these two large rivers as reference points.
At this point, however, Rajala had come to the conclusion that he had lost his bearings and did not know where his plane was. The crew had not used the radio transmitter to contact Kemi Airport, believing that they could handle the problem on their own (Finnish sisu, fortitude and self-reliance at its finest!), and for almost the entire flight he remained on the Rovaniemi Airport frequency.
Rajala did try to set the correct course by switching on the receiver of the omnidirectional azimuth radio beacon located in Rovaniemi, but for some reason the attempt was unsuccessful (hello, beacon operators! The beacon was temporarily switched off, as it turned out later). After this failure, both pilots came to the conclusion that they had crossed the Finnish-Swedish border, the Torniojoki River, well north of the Gulf of Bothnia, which was out of sight.
The two Finnish guys were not particularly excited by this thought: the neighboring countries were in a passport and customs union, crossing the land border was free, and the accidental entry of a Finnish plane into Swedish airspace in bad weather conditions and an emergency landing in Sweden could only cause mental strain in Rajala and Polet, who knew Swedish very poorly and whose memory retained scant scraps from the school study of the second state language of Finland.
In reality, almost at the very beginning of the flight, the pilots directed the plane to the eastern part of Finnish Lapland, and at that moment it was not far from Lake Kemijärvi, approximately 170 km from the Swedish and 70 km from the Soviet-Finnish border. Believing that the plane was in Sweden, Rajala flew it straight east to return to Finland, and noticing a large sawmill, a railway and a highway below, the crew noted with great relief that the plan had worked: the plane was flying between the Swedish cities of Luleå and Kalix back to Finland ("a foreign country – blueberries"!). In reality, the plane was over the Finnish Salla and less than 20 km remained to the state border with the USSR, where vigilant Finnish border guards were already waiting for it.
The tension and stress had exhausted the pilots greatly, so that they had relaxed and stopped monitoring the flight time, concentrating on comparing the flight map with the terrain floating below. Rajala confidently, calmly and professionally controlled the plane, causing a psychologically comfortable state in cadet Polet. In this relaxed and slightly euphoric mood, the pilots crossed the border with the Soviet superpower, invading its sovereign airspace, continuing to observe their native northern landscapes below: forests, swamps, lakes, small hills, a railway and a highway, which further confirmed the correctness of their actions – the plane was returning to Finland via the Swedish town of Haaparanda.
Reality, however, was not slow to knock loudly at the door: the petrol began to run out even before crossing the state border, and Rajala handed over control of the plane to Polet, starting to look for a place for an emergency landing. Suddenly, an unfamiliar airfield appeared ahead on the right. The pilot first flew over the beginning of the runway covered with metal plates, noticing that between the runway and the barracks there were tanks with gun barrels facing west.
Both Finnish guys wisely decided that the Swedish military would not object to the landing of an aircraft from a friendly neighboring state without notification at a military base, and especially would not ask unnecessary questions to the pilots who were refueling the plane from canisters. In reality, the plane landed 80 km to the east of the state border at an airfield in Alakurtti, not used by Soviet military aircraft (landing pad for helicopters of the USSR border troops), the location of the 101st Border Detachment of the KGB of the USSR(military unit 2201), responsible for protecting a 276 km section of the Soviet-Finnish border.
Having landed at a military base in Sweden, as the pilots believed, they did not look for unnecessary problems by contacting local authorities and not speaking the official language of the neighboring country and their own country.
Rather than getting to know the Swedish bureaucracy, which is as unpleasant in appearance and character as its daughter, the Finnish bureaucracy, which looks very much like the Gorgon Medusa (a national trait of the Finns is that they are afraid of and really do not like their native bureaucracy, calling communication with it "paper wars"), Rajala and Polet preferred to refuel the plane from two spare canisters: Rajala climbed onto the wing, unscrewed the gas tank cap and began slowly, so as not to spill the precious liquid, pouring gasoline from the canisters that cadet Polet handed him.
While performing this simple task, Rajala noticed a group of seven soldiers crossing the runway in formation about 200 meters from the Finnish plane and heading towards the barracks. One of the soldiers in a yellow camouflage uniform (it was summer!) approached the plane with a relaxed gait, without, however, engaging in conversation (otherwise our story would have been interrupted at this point), demonstrating with his entire appearance and body language his disposition and good attitude towards the uninvited guests of the garrison (from Rajala's memoirs).
Having filled the tanks with all 40 liters, Rajala decided to leave the hospitable military airfield without delay, rejecting Polet's offer to ask the locals where they were, once again pointing out in polite and refined expressions his poor knowledge of Swedish (Finnish men love to swear, like their neighbors to the east, the magical Finnish words, however, are much inferior to their Russian counterparts in power and expressiveness). Immediately after takeoff, the plane, as before, headed east, in the direction of the Finnish city of Kemi, situated on the northern shore of the Gulf of Bothnia.
To continue.
The North Observer
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