On October 15, 1970, the Soviet Union saw its first successful hijacking of a passenger aircraft. An An-24 flying the Batumi-Sukhumi route was forced to land in Trabzon, Turkey, by 45-year-old Pranas Brazinskas and his 15-year-old son Algirdas.
According to the publication Aviatsiya i Vremya, 114 hijacking attempts were made in the USSR between the 1950s and 1992, and 24 of them succeeded. This case, however, became the best known and marked a turning point.
At the time, airports had neither metal detectors nor baggage screening. The Brazinskases carried aboard two pistols, a sawed-off shotgun, a hunting gun and a grenade. Once the plane reached cruising course, the elder Brazinskas sent a note through a flight attendant demanding a change of route and a halt to radio contact under threat of death.
Flight attendant Nadezhda Kurchenko managed to shout, “Guys, attack!” before gunfire broke out.
19-year-old Kurchenko became the first crew member of a Soviet civilian aircraft to be killed during a hijacking. Captain Georgy Chekhraiya, navigator Valery Fadeyev and flight engineer Oganes Babayan were wounded; co-pilot Suliko Shavidze was saved by a metal part of his seat that stopped a bullet. Despite the crew’s attempts to disrupt the attackers with sharp maneuvers, the aircraft crossed the border and landed in Trabzon.
In Turkey, the hijackers declared themselves political refugees. They were not extradited to the USSR. A Turkish court sentenced Pranas to eight years and Algirdas to two. After an amnesty in 1975, they moved through Italy and Venezuela to the United States, where they lived under the names Frank and Victor White. In 2002, Algirdas killed his father and was later sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After the hijacking, the USSR tightened aviation security by introducing mandatory ID checks, screening of hand luggage, plainclothes police on some flights, arming crews and reinforcing cockpit doors. Nadezhda Kurchenko was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner, and her name was preserved in streets, museums and memorial sites.