It was a routine electronic intelligence flight for Chipurin and his ten-person crew in most respects, other than the fact they were taking off in Kaliningrad and would have to change their route to avoid the storm cells.
Just after takeoff Chipurin turned off his aircraft’s transponder, the electronic signaling device that emits information to air traffic control and other nearby aircraft giving its location and identity. This meant the military turbo prop was essentially invisible to other aircraft, as its radar signature would be all but lost in the clutter from the storms around. Nor would Chipurin make or respond to radio communications with civilian air traffic control or non-Russian military aircraft.
This was a military reconnaissance flight, after all; Captain Chipurin did not take to the skies to make friends.
There was no international law that said military aircraft needed to use transponders, follow standard routes used for civilian traffic, or communicate with air traffic control. But despite the lack of a mandate to do so, flying without a transponder was inherently dangerous.
Civilian aircraft do have onboard radar, but contrary to much public perception, these are not designed to identify other aircraft in the sky. They are instead used for weather and, at low altitude, terrain, but an aircraft in the sky on an onboard radar would appear as a tiny speck, if at all. Tiny specks could also represent rain, birds, or false echoes of nothing that the radar displayed in error.
Commercial aircraft do carry onboard traffic avoidance systems, but these simply collect the transponder codes from aircraft in the area that choose to broadcast them, and show the location and heading of these flights to the pilot.
If a plane does not use its transponder and if the aircraft controller looking at his radar just sees a vague, intermittent, primary signal on his screen, there is a chance, a good chance, that another pilot in the area would never know there was another big, fast-moving, and heavy mass racing along nearby unless he looked out his window and saw it.
And pilots, as a rule, hated such surprises.
But Chipurin thought nothing of this. He was just following his standard procedure for an electronic intelligence reconnaissance flight. Russian ELINT planes virtually always operated in international airspace without using their transponders. Chipurin and his copilot had been doing this sort of thing in steady rotation for several months, and they had been flying for several years, so they had become masters at both getting near and staying clear of other planes in the skies.
In today’s weather there was no way the aircraft controller watching over this section of the Baltic could relay every primary signal to every pilot he was responsible for. Chipurin knew this, but he just told himself he’d stay out of known aviation lanes, he’d avoid the most congested airspace around Stockholm and Helsinki, and he’d keep his eyes sharp.
The first hour of the flight went by quickly. While the captain and his copilot negotiated the weather, altering their path to proceed directly toward Gotland Island as opposed to their original planned-on northwesterly course near Lithuania, the men and women in back calibrated equipment and began listening in on civilian maritime traffic to check audio levels.
Around Gotland, Chipurin ignored the radio calls from the Swedes like he always did when flying near his target’s airspace. He normally didn’t like being noticed up here, but on a day like today, when the weather on so much of their flight path was shit, he was secretly pleased to see that some Swedish ATC had his eyes in his scope.
Just after eight-thirty a.m., they finished what they assumed would be the most difficult part of their day. The area around Stockholm was thick with both heavy thunderstorms and air traffic, but the Il-20M had avoided the commercial jet routes, giving them an even wider berth than normal in case other pilots had decided to deviate from the lanes due to the weather.
This had gone well. Both the pilot and the copilot knew they now had a few easy hours of racetrack patterns before things got tight again as they passed Helsinki on the way to Saint Petersburg, but the weather there would not be as much of a factor, so as far as Chipurin was concerned the rest of the day would be a breeze.
He did, however, have to get around the last of the multicell cluster thunderstorm in the middle of the Baltic, so he changed course to a heading of 353 degrees, turning slightly back toward Sweden.
Doing this helped him avoid the heavy cell, but he did not avoid moving through an updraft that seemed to develop around him on the radar. Storms like this propagated new cells with regularity, so he wasn’t concerned, and it wasn’t particularly strong yet. The Il-20M encountered moderate turbulence, but Chipurin knew it would not be an issue for either the passengers or the equipment, so he decided to just climb a few thousand feet to see if he could find his way out of the clouds.
During a surprisingly heavy buffet the copilot dropped his clipboard, sending dozens of pages onto the floor of the cockpit. The first officer left his seat to pick up several of the pages, but both the pilot and copilot simultaneously turned to help, because pages had spilled all around them. It took only a few seconds before the pilot was back up and gazing at the gray covering his windshield.
Chipurin said, “Where is the top of this shit?”
The copilot said, “Could be sixty thousand. You want to try a new heading?”
Chipurin looked at his radar and saw returns all around him.
“No. We’ll go over it or through it.” Chipurin kept scanning out his windscreen, looking for blue sky. Suddenly they broke out of the storm and began racing over the clouds, giving visual reference to the plane’s speed. When this happened it always felt to the captain like he was flying over a massive snowy field at low level, and he enjoyed the sensation. He rode along here for just a moment, then reached forward to change to a steeper climb that would take them up to 34,000 feet.
Out of his left eye Chipurin detected movement, something outside his windscreen in the clouds. He turned his head toward the motion at his ten-o’clock position, focused on the spot less than a half-mile away, and he saw a puff of white emerge from the top of one of the gray storm clouds like a flower’s bloom. Suddenly, in the middle of the puff, a large white aircraft with a blue vertical stabilizer appeared, just ahead and below the Il-20M, rising out of the clouds in a shallow climb.
“Tchyo za ga lima?” What the fuck?
It was an Airbus A330, a Swedish Airlines commercial flight. Chipurin recognized the aircraft and its distinctive markings. It did not belong right in front of the Ilyushin, there was no reason for it to be where it was, at this altitude, but Chipurin knew he needed to initiate evasive maneuvers because the Airbus was climbing on a heading that would take it up and through his starboard wing if he did not act immediately.
He turned the yoke hard to his left and pulled it back, raising his nose and banking hard to port.
This would have worked, sending the A330 just below his starboard wing, had the pilot of the Swedish airliner not also pulled up his own nose and executed a turn to starboard in response to the impending collision.
Chipurin realized both planes were converging, so he jammed the yoke to the right now and shoved it forward, trying to somehow push himself below the ascending Airbus.
But there was not enough time. His countermovement merely had the effect of correcting the climb and the bank to port, and this ensured his Ilyushin was flying straight and level when the massive A330 drove belly-first into the rear section of the Russian electronic intelligence flight at a converging speed of more than seven hundred knots.