Investigate the mysterious death of the astronaut Gagarin

A Russian investigator recently stated that Yuri Gagarin's hasty action during a training flight could be the cause of the world's first astronaut's death at 34 years old.

Gagarin in astronaut clothes.Photo: chandrakantha.com.

Yuri Gagarin was recorded as the first person to fly into space on April 12, 1961 on the Oriental spacecraft. He flew around the earth for 68 minutes. After the flight Gagarin quickly became a famous figure in the Soviet Union and the world. Almost every newspaper on the planet then wrote about him. Many cities in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa have awarded Gagarin the honorary citizenship title.

Seven years after his historic flight, Gagarin died in a flight training with MiG-15 fighter jet with a pilot named Vladimir Seryogin on March 27, 1968. He was only 34 years old. The plane made a dive so deep that it plunged into a forest near the city of Kirzhach in central Russia. The first astronaut in the world and Seryogin died. For more than 40 years, many theories about the cause of Gagarin's death have been raised. Many people said he drank alcohol before boarding a plane, but some thought he was being harmed.

Soviet officials have never officially announced the cause of the accident. Investigators only concluded that the accident occurred due to "the pilot performing a sudden operation to avoid a hot air balloon or cloud". This conclusion is said to be unclear. Documents related to the accident all have the word "top secret" on the cover. Therefore the death of Gagarin is considered a mystery during the past few decades.

RIA Novosti recently reported that some independent Russian investigators claim they have found important evidence of Gagarin's death. Igor Kuznetsov, a retired Air Force colonel of Russia, is the team leader. He believes the new finding will end rumors about the cause of Gagarin's death.

After a round-the-earth flight in 1961, Gagarin died in a plane crash when he was 34 years old.Photo: wikipedia.com.

According to RIA Novosti, Kuznetsov and a group of aviation experts investigated Gagarin's plane crash for nine years. They study every possible situation in the accident with modern investigation techniques.

After considering several hundred documents related to Gagarin's accident, Kuznetsov said that a vent valve in the cockpit opened during flight made the pressure drop. Gagarin and pilots with the driver realized that when the plane was at 4,000 m altitude. They rushed to take urgent action to let the plane descend to a safer elevation. But due to rushing down, the two pilots fainted. Soon the plane crashed into a forest and exploded.

According to Kuznetsov, with medical knowledge at that time, Gagarin and Seryogin probably did not know how to descend too quickly to lower altitude was dangerous. In addition, the operation instructions for the MiG-15 also contain many errors. For example, they did not specify what the pilot had to do with the ventilation valves.

Kuznetsov also stated that it was possible that a careless pilot once controlled the MiG-15 before Gagarin and the pilot did not close the vent valve before leaving the plane.

Until now people still thought that Gagarin was the last person to drive the MiG-15 two days before the accident. But Kuznetsov discovered that some other pilots had driven the plane before Gagarin's fateful flight, the Telegraph said.

'Nobody knows what really happened during Gagarin's last flight, except for us. So we have to announce the true cause of the first astronaut's death to the Russian people and the international community. Unsealed ventilation valves have caused all subsequent developments in the accident. New information needs to be independently verified by a government committee or foreign experts , 'Kuznetsov said.

However, many people disagree with Kuznetsov's conclusion. For example, they believe that an emergency low-altitude can't make both pilots unconscious at the same time. Professor Arseny Mironov - one of the aviation experts involved in the investigation of Gagarin's accident, said that unfortunately the aircraft had no black box.

"Since there is no black box, we cannot know exactly what happened before the plane fell," Voice of Russia quoted Mironov.